Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Once again, Lyz of And You Call Yourself A Scientist and Chad of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, have invited me along on one of their round table reviews. Here we look at two recent adaptations of classic horror movies, to see just how close to their sources they really are: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Victor Frankenstein has led a blessed life. He grew up surrounded by people who loved him: his mother, his father, and Elizabeth, the orphan the family adopted who will one day be Victor’s bride. He is extraordinarily intelligent, with a powerful aptitude for the sciences; he seems destined to bring both great things to himself and the family name. Then he goes away to college, and grows increasingly obsessed with knowledge that would better be left unknown. Over months, he develops an experiment to imbue dead tissue with life- and when he succeeds, a sown up corpse breathes. Victor runs away in terror. All that follows is inevitable.
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Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
Readers who come to Frankenstein the novel with their only knowledge of the story gleaned from its myriad influences on popular culture are in for a shock. Unless they’ve seen the movie discussed below (or a few others), they’ll find a plot which is different from the popular versions in nearly every regard, save the instantly recognizable surname and the essential idea of man bringing life to dead flesh. Whether or not they are disappointed by this deviation is a matter of individual taste, but it’s important to be prepared for differences when going in; there are few classic novels which have been treated with quite so much disregard as this one when it comes to adaptation, and expectations are important when trying to appreciate an already flawed piece of work.
The changes start in the preface, which, for the first seven or eight pages, seems to have nothing to do with anything at all. A certain obsessive gentleman named Robert Walton is fixated on being the first man to reach the North Pole; to that end, he has gathered together a crew and a ship under his captainship and sailed towards the Arctic, fervently convinced of his own righteousness. We learn of this through the letters he writes home to his sister, and the amount of background information we get on a character who will exist in the novel for no more than twenty pages, and whose primary purpose is to be in the neighborhood when Frankenstein needs someone to talk to, is absurd. Shelley wants to parallel Victor and Robert’s respective obsessions; unfortunately, she spends too much time setting this parallel up, and the section, the whole framing sequence, feel unnecessary and overdone.
This is a criticism one could quite fairly lay against much of the narrative- too many things are delved into too deeply, or presented too elaborately, to be taken seriously. The most telling example of this is the infamous flashback sequence where the Creature describes his first real exposure to humanity, and in doing so takes a brief foray into what is apparently another novel entirely, involving the adventures of an outcast noble, his son and daughter, and a beautiful Turkish woman who is somehow the cause the other’s distress. There’s no real way to justify this section of the book, no clever critical excuse to give it meaning; it’s sloppy, immature plotting, and any editor worth his salt would recognize it and gently suggest a well-advised correction or two, hopefully involving a lot of white-out.
Why no editor did this, I can’t truly say, although I suspect the publishing process was quite a bit different 1818 than it is today.
Clearly, there are pieces of the novel where too much time is spent on digressions; conversely, some of the more important sections happen so quickly that it’s almost as though they were never there at all. The Creature’s creation is a clear case of this, and also one of the biggest let-downs for a reader who grew up on Boris Karloff. After decades of movies, we’re expecting lightning, a lab, something vaguely humanoid wrapped in bandages, a guy in a white coat dashing from here to there yelling helpful things like, “The lever!” and “Not now, you fool” to his hunchbacked companion; eventually the platform rises, there are many sparks, and white coat yells, “It’s alive!”
In other words, the creation sequence is invariably one of the major set-pieces of every Frankenstein movie. With Shelley, it’s the book’s biggest anti-climax; a chapter worth of build-up discussing Victor’s growing obsessions and his ultimate goal, and then, at the head of the next chapter, a four line paragraph. Literally.
Swear to god, the first time I read the novel, I hit that point and had to check back to the previous page to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. Victor’s two biggest mistakes, making the Creature, and then shunning it when it becomes a he, happen in the space of two sentences.
Shelley must not have been much interested in the mechanics of her story, and perhaps it’s best, if she was this apathetic, that she didn’t force herself to describe it more explicitly. But it’s still a flaw: the abruptness throws off the pace sharply, especially after all the time which is spent (vaguely) on Victor’s researches and torments both before and after. It’s not a flaw that kills the novel, obviously, but it is a disappointment for me every time I read it; I keep thinking maybe I wasn’t looking close enough last time.
I’m getting myself into a trap here: I’m doing the “Uneducated fella slams on a novel simply because it’s supposed to be a classic, and it isn’t as good as it should be” routine. And I’ll confess that, while I enjoyed the novel very much the first time I read it, regardless of its flaws, this time was seriously rough going. I started noticing how all the characters are either bland or unlikable; the only one I ever truly care about is the Creature, and he’s a multiple murderer. Even more painful was realizing just how slow much of this reads; you can’t throw a rock without hitting a two page long description of some landscape or another. Descriptions are important, but there’s a limit to how much I need to be reminded that whatever country Victor is wandering around in is exceptionally pretty, allowing him for the moment to lose his troubles in its vast majesty.
So, as a pure read, this one is in many ways a loss, and very much the sort of novel an 18 year old might write. (As a person whose written an 18 year old novel which is vastly inferior to this one, I feel I might commit on this with some authority.) It’s overwrought, melodramatic, and far too silly in places when it should be moving. It often sacrifices clarity for poetics, and while Toni Morrison can pull that off and make it work, Shelley cannot.
But there must be something, right? The story has been with us for nearly two hundred years, and you can still walk into any major book store in the country and find a copy in print, generally with some erudite commentary at the beginning and the end about the whole thing relates to menstrual cramps or some crap. Scholars still write on it; movies still get made showing its influence; everyone knows its name. Clearly, Mrs. Shelley did something right.
Despite my kvetching, her successes aren’t that difficult to spot. The central concept is brilliant: turning Pygmalion in its ear by pitting a male Galatea against his creator, is a wonderfully resonant idea, especially in the nature of this Galatea’s revenge, the ultimate destruction of the House of Frankenstein. There is something emotionally wrenching in watching Victor lose his brother, his best friend, and finally his wife at the hands of a son he cannot truly understand or empathize with, and there is also something instantly identifiable in the Creature’s utter exile from human society.
That last one is the real key; the Frankenstein story has survived over so many years, and through so many permutations, because of the character of the Creature and his relation to the world. He is the most sympathetic person in the story, partly because he expresses his misery so eloquently (his scenes with Frankenstein are among the best in the novel), and partly because, unlike the rest of us, he is able to in some small part deliver suffering upon those which have inspired suffering in him. It’s not that we cheer when he strangles Victor’s baby brother William (or maybe we do- William’s a bit of a brat); it’s more that recognize that capacity for rage in ourselves and empathize with it’s execution, just as we empathize with early scenes of the Creature’s pathos.
Victor Frankenstein is the narrator of his tale, but he is not the one who stays with us. Much like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost (a work which Shelley draws deliberate parallels to), the Creature dominates the narrative. It’s difficult to tell what specific moral one can draw from such domination; saying simply, “Don’t throw stones at ugly people” doesn’t seem to cover it. Nor does the traditional “Don’t tamper in God’s domain”- while Victor is destroyed because of his hubris, his creation is not innately evil, but rather a sensitive, intelligent being driven to increasingly horrific acts of vengeance by his creator’s contempt and the horror he inspires in all he meets.
There, I think, is the heart of it: the only real theme or lesson one can safely take from the book. Frankenstein speaks to the need for compassion in all living things- and the necessity of taking responsibility for the things one brings into this world.
SCREEN:
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Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, directed by Kenneth Branagh
The pre-credits sequence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein gives a good idea of the nature of the rest of the film. First, there’s an exposition crawl about the pursuit of the elusive North Pole. Then we see a ship sailing towards that very goal, and after some mild tension is established between the crew and captain Robert Walton (Aidan Quinn), we’re in an exciting storm sequence, which leaves the ship trapped in ice. The men disembark, and find themselves in what seems to be a vast Arctic waste land; then a man (Kenneth Branagh) arrives by sled. He demands information from them, and the captain asks for his name; the man pushes back his hood and says, in a tone that screams “You should be sooo bloody impressed by this,” “I am Victor FRANKENSTEIN!”
Cut to black, and the main title flies in at us from about thirty miles away.
How does this represent the rest of the movie, you ask? No, there’s no consistent nautical theme, and none of the characters (except, of course, for Victor FRANKENSTEIN) have any impact over the main story. No, the important bit is that moment where Brannagh pauses- and then delivers his name- followed by the “incoming!” titles. It is over-dramatic; it is more than a little bit goofy; and in terms of story logic, it is utterly absurd. After all, there is no reason for any of these men to have heard of Frankenstein before, so why would the character, were he a real human being and not just a fiction, state his name so dramatically?
The reason is to impress us, the audience; we surely know the name, and we know what it means. But there’s a difference between impressing the audience with the importance of a dramatic moment, and bashing our heads in in an attempt to make a moment dramatic. You may know what that difference is; Brannagh, who directs and stars, doesn’t have a flippin’ clue.
Take Mrs. Frankenstein’s death sequence. It’s stormy outside; inside we find Dr. Frankenstein (Ian Holm) assisting his wife with the birth, with two maids by his side. We know something is going wrong- the pregnant woman is screaming, there’s lots of blood, Ian Holm seems to be going mad with horror- but that isn’t enough for our Branagh, now is it? No, we get these never ending camera circles around the room, like the whole scene was filmed inside a Tilt-A-Whirl. Distraught, Dr. F leaves the room with the blood still covering his hands, and falls to his knees on the incredibly long staircase as Victor and Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) rush past him; when V and E get in the room, they find the dead mother (and the never-ending 360 degree camera whirl), and there’s still lots of blood; so Victor goes behind the corpse, cradles her head in his arms, and says over and over again, “Bring her back, bring her back.”
Oh, and did I mention that lightning strikes a dead tree outside the house when Mother dies?
Sigh.
All right. One could argue that Branagh is fully aware of what he’s doing here, that he’s trying to go over the top as far as possible in order to give the picture a truly operatic feel. After all, this is the man who directed Henry V and Dead Again- he’s not an idiot. If this is the case, well, it doesn’t work. There’s too much going on here, too many camera twirls and insane moments and characters being generally overwrought for the story to be affecting. Instead of majestic, it all comes off as campy; you start looking forward to what fresh inanity the movie will throw out next, and that’s really not the response you’re looking for when filming a classic horror movie.
As for the acting, surprisingly, it’s not so bad. After the initial silliness of his entrance, Branagh is quite good; at least, he’s good as this conception of the character, a conception which makes him too much of a hero to be utterly satisfactory. After all, Frankenstein in just about every version of the tale is the guy who starts all the problems to begin with, both through his construction of the monster and his refusal to acknowledge same. He can’t be entirely perfect- without a flaw, his story loses its moral core, and becomes just a series of grotesque accidents with a pathetic finale. So Brannagh’s take won’t be replacing Colin Clive or Peter Cushing in my heart anytime soon (how could he?); but he doesn’t exactly embarrass himself either.
Robert DeNiro gets the top billing, and my take on his performance was one of the few bones of contention between myself and my fellow reviewers when we got around to discussing the film. (I trust, if you haven’t already, you will click through to that discussion at the bottom of this review.) First things first: I think DeNiro is a terrific actor. I can’t think of a movie I’ve seen him in where he didn’t deliver the goods, and more so. His portrayals genuinely convince because they are thoroughly considered and richly textured, and if you think I’m saying this to excuse what I’m about to say, you’re probably right.
He approaches the role of the Creature with the same care he shows all his parts; most importantly, he plays it utterly straight. Obviously he thought about what it would be like to have a mouth that didn’t feel quite right, and a face that was literally stitched on (as well as most of his body)- and if this was a more low-key, realistic film, that approach would have been a huge success. My problem is, he’s the friggin monster of the movie, and he’s outdone by everyone else around him. When he makes his appearances, when we see him on screen, he should be both horrifying and pathetic- instead, he’s sort of icky. He looks like a Dick Tracy villain, for god’s sake, and comes off (when threatening Victor) as a petty thug. There should be a hint of the supernatural around the character, especially in this version which seems almost infested with spirits; instead, he’s a burn victim with a bad skin graft.
Most importantly, he’s not scary. No matter what he does, he never inspires terror. Which makes you wonder why everyone freaks out whenever he makes an appearance.
Helena Bonham Carter played her usual “Helena Bonham Carter in a period costume drama” role, and I thought she did quite well, even if Elizabeth is little more than a love interest. Weirdly enough, the screenwriters make a great point of stressing her vaguely incestuous connection with Victor by having them call each other brother and sister at key moments of passion. (Elizabeth was adopted by the Frankenstein family when both she and Victor were very young; they’ve grown up together almost like relations, except for the implicit surety that when the two were old enough, they’d be married.) I’m not sure what this is supposed to indicate- Lyz suggests a possibility in our talk, but I’m not sold. Maybe you can figure it out.
Ian Holm is great. The scene at Victor’s party where Holm gives a speech is quite touching in its way, and reminded me of Holm’s similar moment as Bilbo in Fellowship of the Rings. The guy’s a pro, and manages to make his character utterly believable; I found him rather affecting, when he wasn’t clutching his bloody hands and moaning. Tom Hulce, as Victor’s best friend Henry, is, well, not so great. He has a few good lines, but seems to spend the rest of the movie as a background convenience, to be brought forward only to assure us that Victor has friends, or to give a counterpoint to Victor’s abnormal obsession with dangerous sciences. And then there’s the fact that, in the last ten minutes, the movie forgets about him all together- but that could hardly be laid at Hulce’s feet.
Special effects? Special effects are cool, although they consist mostly of the Creature’s make-up and a gory death. Then there’s the nearly hysterical score. A note from one of the scenes: “Well, the music thinks something important is going on, that’s for sure.” It certainly doesn’t help things, anyway.
COMPARE/CONTRAST:
The title proclaims Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and for once, it’s not a lie. At least not completely. Nearly all movies with “Frankenstein” in the title have taken huge leaps from their source material, many going so far as to ignore that source entirely. Clearly, the folks involved in this movie wanted to make a clear distinction between themselves and those other pictures. By doing so, they set certain expectations in their audience, a surprisingly large number of which are actually met; but whether or not that makes this a successful adaptation is another thing entirely.
One of the more unwieldly elements of the novel that was used in the movie is that odd, over-involved framing device. While the film elimantes much of the captain’s back story, it still makes a point of explaining what the ship is, and what’s its seeking. While purists will be pleased to see this brought to the screen for once, it is largely unnecessary; the attempt at including it in the overall theme of the movie doesn’t quite play- or rather, it doesn’t seem important enough to include as a distraction. Perhaps the ship was kept in order to have the striking finale which is so important to the novel, but one wonders if a better, more efficient way to do so might have been found.
Still, there are places where the adaptors were able to take painfully flawed parts of the novel and streamline them into plausibility. The main case of this is the sequence I mentioned earlier where the Creature becomes educated through his contact with one of the more unlikely groups of people in all of fiction. Now, it makes sense that the Creature learn to speak and think; one of the most important aspects of his character is his ability to argue with his creator on equal (or maybe even more than equal) terms. How, though, does one teach a being who gets beaten automatically by everyone he meets?
Simple: have him stumble onto a cabin inhabited by a once prosperous family who have been exiled from France due to the son’s unfortunate work to free an unjustly accused Turkish merchant, who promised his daughter to the son in return for the son’s gallant help, only he reneged once he was freed in order to keep his daughter from the infidel. Now, the Turkish daughter is in contact with the son, and of course romance is developing; but the woman doesn’t know a lick of French, so on her frequent visits to the cabin, the family teaches her, also teaching the Creature, who is hiding in an out-building that no one uses.
Eventually, once he’s mastered the language, the Creature finds a trunk, which holds copies of Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, and The Sorrow of Werter. With these fine, kindergarten level primers, he teaches himself to read.
Admittedly, just about any solution to the Creature’s education is going to be implausible. But this one? It’s like Mary Shelley went utterly mad for thirty pages, decided to hell with story logic and concocted this absolutely ridiculous little romance fantasy. No one would ever buy that on screen.
The problem then becomes, if one is to adapt this novel faithfully, just how much of the French Digression do you keep?
Wisely, the screenwriters chose to throw most of it away. The Creature still stumbles upon a family in the forest, and still finds a building to hide in (here, it’s the enclosed sty- which is a kind of implausible, as surely someone tends the pigs occasionally, but I’ll let it go), and there’s still a blind old man who plays an instrument, and the young man is still named Felix, but instead of brother and sister, him and the woman are husband and wife. There’s no exile from France, no visits from Turkish hotties; instead, the Creature learns to speak and read from watching the mother educate her children. He doesn’t find any books, of course, and while he’s able to speak and think clearly, he doesn’t reach the heights of eloquence attained in the novel; but that’s not quite as important here. What is important is that we give him a voice without alienating the audience throw implausibility, and that is accomplished quite nicely.
Other changes aren’t quite so impressive. For one thing, there’s an attempt to give Victor a motivation for his actions; he’s not merely enthralled with the wonders of science and his own brilliance, he’s driven by the truly ugly death of his mother, and his need to ensure that “No need ever die again.” The problem with this is that it reduces Victor’s culpability in the creation of the Creature. Instead of simply getting too carried away by his own hubris, he’s on a mission- or rather a Mission, to save humanity and make the world a better place. He’s still carried away, but his goals are so noble that it’s difficult to fault him for getting so carried away. Novel Victor wants to create a noble, superior race; Movie Victor just wants to make sure no one ever loses their Mommy again.
Also in terms of lessening Victor’s guilt is the handling of the death of Justine. In the novel, after the Creature strangles William, the Frankenstein’s maid Justine is accused of the crime due to circumstantial evidence the Creature planted on her. What follows is a fairly painful sequence of trials and deliberations on Justine’s guilt, culminating in her conviction and eventual hanging. During all of this, Victor has realized who the true murderer must be, and while he remains steadfast in his insistence of Justine’s innocence, he takes no steps to clear her name by revealing what he knows. His excuse is moderately reasonable: no one would possibly believe him. But by not even trying, by remaining entirely separate of the affair which he essentially brought about, he becomes more and more tainted- one suspects that, when the Creature confronts him, Victor’s rage is more due to his own feelings of guilt than anything else.
Contrast that with the movie where events are much abbreviated. Justine is found and jailed after William is found dead, for the same reason as before, but before her trial can begin, before Victor can even consider revealing the true story, a mad crowd breaks her out of prison and lynches her. No joke about the timing here: Victor learns Justine’s been arrested, and then immediately after sees the poor girl thrown off a castle wall. Once again, it seems less that Victor’s own sins are killing those around him than a spectacularly unfortunate run of bad luck.
Other minor changes abound: Victor’s relationship with the college becomes less that of provident genius who is respected and avoided by peers, and more that of rebel who only hangs out with the really cool Profs., the ones with the best toys- which is another interesting change. In the book, Prof. Waldeman’s main importance is to introduce Frankenstein to the tools of chemistry. In the movie, Waldeman (played by a supremely uncomfortable looking John Cleese) has apparently already done all the hard work in figuring out how to resurrect the dead- all he need do is die so Frankenstein can make his masterpiece by steal his dead mentor’s work and taking it one step further. I’m not exactly sure what this does to the story, but there is a hint of the “pure and noble” Vic being corrupted by the other man’s wickedness. Which means less culpability all around.
The biggest change, though, and perhaps the most damning one, is the blatant insertion of twenty extra minutes worth of story into the movie, after the novel’s natural ending. This is spoiler stuff, obviously, so be warned.
In case you didn’t know, in the novel, the Creature kills Elizabeth in her and Victor’s nuptial bed, following through on a threat he made to Victor when Victor refused to build him a mate. Afterwards, Victor’s father dies of horror, and Victor begins a quest to hunt down the Creature and destroy him.
The movie doesn’t quite work that way: immediately after Elizabeth’s death, Victor goes crazy, and decides to bring her back to life, using the equipment he had installed at home. He carries her corpse back to the family estate, utterly ignoring Henry’s pleas for him to turn away, and using what he has on hand (he sows E’s head onto Justine’s corpse- maybe this is symbolism, trying to restore the women his actions have killed?), brings E back to life. E is a bit floppy and can’t speak straight, but seems to recognize Victor, and they dance awkwardly in a moderately disturbing sequence. Then that party crashing Creature shows up, and demands this new creation for its mate. Victor and the Creature engage in heated discussion, E sees how ugly she is, and crushes an oil lamp over her head, bursting into flame. (Which is odd, since she was immersed in amniotic fluid up till recently. Is that flammable?)
What’s wrong with this? Well, it’s rushed, for one thing. In fact, the entire final sequence is rushed, as though the writers decided the plots all had to be resolved in ten minutes or they’d explode. Even more ridiculous is Victor return home with the body of Elizabeth, then bringing her back to life, then having the entire family mansion burn down, all in the space of a single night.
But even disregarding that, it doesn’t make sense in the story. I just kept thinking Pet Sematary, but the thing about Pet Sematary is that the main character grows more insane as the story progresses; Victor Frankenstein needs to grow less, as each new horror drives the wrongness of his act into greater and greater clarity. After all, he makes the big moral decision of the story when he decides not to build a mate for the Creature. To have him respond to Elizabeth’s death in the way he does is to indicate that he hasn’t learned anything- and if he hasn’t by this point, there’s a good chance he isn’t going to.
Still, even with all this, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a nearly faithful adaptation of its source material. Perhaps more important for this than any other element is that it stays true to the tone of the book. Remember all my bitching in the previous section about how over-dramatic the film was? Frankly, that’s the tone of the novel as well; there is a feverish feeling to the prose that, while occasionally overdone, is surprisingly hyptonic; if you are willing to give yourself over to the book, it is possible to be caught up in its world.
And that, unfortunately, is why the movie fails as a movie, even if it is a moderate success as an adaptation. Because while that intensity of tone can work in prose, it fails miserably on the screen. Perhaps Brannagh goes too far, perhaps he doesn’t go far enough; regardless, the end effect is a film that leaves you almost always on the outside of events- it even distances you from the Creature, and that is something no true Frankenstein movie should do.
SOURCE: QQQ.5
SCREEN: QQ
Seriously, though, what was up with all those eels?
Had enough? I thought not.
For more Mary Shelley action, hope on over to Lyz’s review.
For the other half of this pair from hell, read my review of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Finally, check out the three-way where Chad, Lyz and I rip into both these films. How’s that for content!