by Dan Lord
I’m sure to rankle everybody with this one: I thought Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein was mediocre. I like del Toro; Pan’s Labyrinth was good; I still think Blade II was very cool; I liked Hellboy; I was even enjoying his cameos in Death Stranding before I realized I never have time to play video games anymore. I was looking forward to being pleased by Frankenstein. But I watched it, made it to the end, and muttered, “Eh. Not bad.” Not particularly good, either, though. I could feel the understimulated synapses in my hippocampus begin to crumble like dry bread before I’d even left the living room; no lasting impression had been made.
But in the weeks since its release on Netflix, the internet has become sopping wet with unadulterated praise for it. Post after post, thread after thread, it has been declared a masterpiece. I promise I’m not trying to be an agitator, but I feel somewhat compelled to be the Voice Crying Out in the Wilderness on this one. You probably love this movie, but just hear me out. Just for fun.
I won’t get into the “hey that wasn’t like the book” fracas. I don’t mind at all when a director goes off-book and does it well, and brings out themes, moods, even scenes and characters that differ from the original manuscript. To this day, I think David Fincher improved vastly on Fight Club, and Spielberg made a much better story out of Jaws than Peter Benchley. I’m always ready to see del Toro’s take on anything. But here are the thoughts that nettled me during my viewing, in no particular order:
It’s hammy. Very hammy. I understand that gothic presentations carry the threat of melodrama almost by necessity, but there are scenes where even the great Oscar Isaac delivers his lines with so much vocal pork and so many self-conscious grandiose hand flourishes that it’s almost vaudevillian. It takes me out of the story fast and makes me chuckle.
So, Frankenstein’s monster is now MCU Frankenstein’s monster? Why in the world does he have superpowers? This addition is goofy, irrelevant…a cheap adolescent way to push the “excite” button on generations of people who don’t know how to enjoy a story without massive CGI spectacle. Isn’t it enough that Frank’s creation is a freakish exile made of sewn-together body parts? He also has to be the Hulk? I couldn’t help but snort when he pushes the entire ship out of a blockade of ice and into the ocean.
With his incredible inexplicable superpowers he slaughters something like, what, half the crew? I lost count. They’re completely innocent seafarers, presumably with siblings and spouses and children; the monster tears them to shreds, and there is never even a bit of reflection about this horrendous event. I do tend to lose a little sympathy for the main character when he does this, he who is supposed to be at heart noble, philosophical, and misunderstood. After all, this isn’t a scene like at De Lacey’s house, where the guys gang up on him out of nowhere and try to murder him. I can understand him defending himself in that case. But the attack on the ship’s crew is just insane, premeditated maniacal slaughter. And how dumb is it at the end: no apology…the crew members have seen their brothers and friends ripped apart, and they’re just, like: “sure, ok, no problem, the captain says you’re cool, so, have a nice day…”
Frankenstein’s castle lab is ridiculous. Like any del Toro fan, I look forward to lavish visuals, but they really should serve the story, all done and said. The abandoned castle would have served the story better if it had been merely dilapidated and cold and lonely-looking, as a nice metaphor for the state of Frank’s soul—a haunted place no one would visit. Instead, del Toro makes it the 9th Wonder of the World. The architecture is so distractingly astounding that you wonder why there aren’t regular guided tours going on.
And there’s a pit. WHAT IS THE PIT? Why does the room that Frank will use as a lab have a huge round pit with smoothed edges and no guardrail?? Like the squirrels’ nut hole in Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Frank’s just going to work around that?? And obviously the first thing any half-conscious audience member can say upon seeing the pit is “geeeeeee, I wonder if someone is going to fall into that pit later in this movie?” And whaddyaknow! Someone DOES!
This one killed me: Elizabeth, a sweet, innocent, physically delicate Victorian Age woman, learns that under the castle, in a subterranean vault, there dwells some sort of deranged, deformed, monstrous humanoid, and in the middle of the night she decides to go down by herself and check him out? Something virtually no person in human history would ever do?
Sort of like in Kubrick’s The Shining, if there’s never much of a warm relationship established between father/son or creator/creature, then it doesn't hit very hard when the two grow quickly apart, or when they reconcile at the end. This is why there’s an overall emotional flatness for me…del Toro rushes to scenes of the monsters’s rejection and shame, and wallows around in it, but we can’t feel it much because we were never shown more than a few seconds of actual acceptance by Frankenstein; by the same token del Toro rushes through the final reconciliation, so I don’t feel that they ever lost much love or gained much love back again.
Gosh, what a debbie downer I am. But, hey, if it’s a movie about someone misunderstood, in exile and shame, and how it affects the people closest to him that you’re interested in, have I got a recommendation for YOU: Anemone. I watched it on Peacock. Now THAT movie is a masterpiece. Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Bean, and Samantha Morton, co-written by Day-Lewis and his son, Ronan, this movie is breathtaking. EXQUISITELY written, superbly acted…gorgeous to look at…the relationships are complex but familiar at the same time.
The story proceeds flawlessly: we start with a single old man living alone deep in the forest. Another old man seeks him out…while a young man and his mother wait at home. It’s positively riveting to slowly but steadily discover who is who, and who did what, and why…and, yes, people, at the end, after getting to know these characters and the crosses they carried and where it all goes to, I held my head in my hands and cried like a big old baby.
Anemone is a movie you must watch. Feel free to compare its beauty, poetry, staggering pain and aching hope with Frankenstein, and you may find yourself re-evaluating what a masterpiece really looks like.
Thank you for reading! This will be my place for regular literary ramblings: That Strangest of Wars. Feel free to leave respectful comments, and I hope we can all meet here again and again. Cheers! -Dan
