Who is Kenneth Brannagh? To look at him now, he is a multi-award-winning director adding his take to the canon of successful awards bait turned moustache receptacle. Earlier in 2022, he had two movies playing in cinemas – simultaneously. Go back a bit further, and he was involved in the MCU, setting Thor off on his popular avenger’s adventure. He is a classically trained theatre actor; he also found time to direct an adaptation of Frankenstein – which, in his case, is prefaced by the name of the author in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The busy, chameleonic actor/director’s adaptation is finally seeing the light of day with a 4K Blu-ray from Arrow Video.
There have been so many iterations and adaptations of Frankenstein that by 1994 it was played out, stale, tired. It turns out that such an assessment is wholly wrong, a conclusion arrived at thanks to one of two excellent new on-disc features. In “Dissecting Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” – experts David Pirie, Jonathan Rigby, and Stephen Volk explain that this is the most accurate big-screen version of Mary Shelley’s novel. Before this, the pop culture Frankenstein that became de rigueur came from Universal Studios in their monster cycle. Every version seemingly calls back to James Whale’s film and Boris Karloff’s legendary performance. Which begs the question, what is different?
The classic image is one of high Gothicism, with castles and crowds rampaging through the European countryside with torches and pitchforks in hand – turns out that little of this is in Kenneth Branagh’s faithful adaptation. Instead, the story begins with Captain Walton leading a troubled expedition to reach the North Pole. While there and facing mutiny, Victor Frankenstein turns up, cold, and he’s lost his mind from his exploits. The brilliant Doctor has followed his ungodly abomination north. Grabbing some respite from the bitter cold, he regales Captain Walton with his story. From there, events head back in time to when he was a frighteningly clever child growing up in Geneva. After his mother dies giving birth to a younger sibling, he heads to the University of Ingolstadt to pursue his dangerous ambitions in the medical field. Sometime later, after drawing the ire of the university’s upper crust, he locks himself away in the attempt to create a living being from dead tissue. Only, he doesn’t do this in a vast castle with a hunchback assistant in the middle of a storm but alone in a grungy side street with an alarming amount of amniotic fluid and an electrical charge. The resulting creation, played by Robert De Niro, is not a monosyllabic oath but a sensitive, intelligent soul who is as strong as he is tragic. What follows from that is a battle of wills between the two, with the Doctor disowning his creation, abandoning him on the streets to a fatal epidemic, and the monster itself swearing bloody vengeance. The film returns to Captain Walton in the north to give this melodrama the send-off it deserves.
De Niro playing the monster as a poetic soul who wears his barely formed emotions on his sleeve, a character arc whose resolution is, dare I say it, rather beautiful. It’s easy to forget how good he can be.
Frankenstein is one of the historical origins of the point where horror and science fiction meet. Brannagh doesn’t bother himself with that – instead, he skews closer to melodrama in everything from the score (by Patrick Doyle) to the overblown dramatics. Perhaps that is unfair, as that opens the door to claims others have made, that this is full of overacting. This isn’t true. Everything Brannagh has achieved as a director is in keeping with the cinematic language of Gothic Romance, a genre where this perfectly lays its head. The violence is still present – with its visions of dead flesh, experiments born from the mind of a “mad scientist,” and a scarred monster murdering innocent people. But, at the end of the day, this is unmistakably a melodrama.
Typically, Frankenstein movies tend to align with the plight of the monster more than the doctor. The monster still receives plenty of screentime, however, the script shoots for a more emotional tale with the doctor and a young Helena Bonham Carter (Elizabeth Lavenza Frankenstein). Yes, he has an on/off-again romantic relationship with the woman he grew up with as an adoptive sister. She might be beautiful, but it doesn’t make it any less creepy, even if it was accepted within 18th-century society. Furthermore, I’ve never seen a Frankenstein movie more enamoured with its leading man – the number of times he gallivants about with his shirt off and glistening hair. It’s distracting. Worse, it makes the whole affair campy in a very uncomplimentary light for such a dark gothic tale.
The reason why anyone should watch this is Robert De Niro. He is superb in a role that many have misunderstood, or worse, belittled with claims of ‘overacting’ and ‘shouts all the time’. His monster is a contemplative soul, looking for a place to belong and he possesses the means to communicate it. The classic Frankenstein scene where the monster makes friends with the blind old man is touching in a way it rarely is (in this case, that character is a British TV institution – Richard Briers). And that is due to De Niro playing the monster as a poetic soul who wears his barely formed emotions on his sleeve, a character arc whose resolution is, dare I say it, rather beautiful. It’s easy to forget how good he can be. It was only in roles such as this, outside his iconic performances, that you truly begin to grasp how deep his talent ran.
It must be surprising then for me to admit that this adaptation does not rank among the best – no matter how faithful. The reason is simple, outside of the more graphic edges, De Niro and Briers, most performances are forgettable at best and ego-centric at worst. Kenneth Branagh, in particular, is one of the worst Dr Frankenstein’s outside of liberal reinterpretations. His version appears to have slipped in from the soundstage next door, where they are filming a perfume commercial. This all means the various attempts at courting an emotional resolution fall completely flat. Well, unless De Niro is involved, of course, the movie is at its best through him.
The 4K restoration is stunning. Extras include many interviews, and two featurettes titled “Dissecting Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein”, and “Mary Shelley and The Creation of a Monster”. From 1910 is a beautifully restored first-ever on-screen adaptation, subtitled “A Liberal Adaptation from Mrs Shelley’s Famous Story”. Honestly, to see Shelley’s creation completely fresh is unique to behold.
MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN IS OUT NOW ON 4K ARROW BLU-RAY
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ROB’S ARCHIVE – MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN (1994)
