Word: whaled
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...gets the sense that James Whale may have given Gods and Monsters an unfavorable review. Granted, the acting is stellar: Ian McKellen turns yet another masterful performance as the aging filmmaker, Brendan Fraser gives a surprisingly adept take on Clayton Boone, the naive young love interest of the homosexual Whale. Lynn Redgrave, heir to her family's tradition of great acting, takes on the role of Hanna, the staid housekeeper who mediates between Whale and Boone with notable sensitivity, making sympathetic a character who could have been made merely boring in less talented hands. The screenplay too, authored by director...
...writing here, however, belies the failing of Gods and Monsters: It could have just as well been produced as a play. The difference between action movies and independent films seems to be that the one has lots of explosions, and the other has lots of conversations. Lots of them. Whale talking to Boone. Boone talking to Whale. Whale talking to Hanna about Boone. Boone talking to his buddies about Whale. Whale talking to Boone about his buddies talking to Boone about Whale. Enough. This is not to say that what Gods and Monsters needs is less talking and more explosions...
There are, thankfully, some notable exceptions in Gods and Monsters, namely Whale's dreams and flashbacks. The former have him in his own movies, playing the Doctor Frankenstein to Boone's Monster and vice versa. Shot in retrospective monochrome, the film here manages to capture the beauty of Whale's movies without distracting the viewer from the matter at hand--Whale and Boone's increasingly complex relationship. Similarly, the flashbacks to the war, and to Whale's wistful memories of "love in the foxholes," are masterfully done. Alas, these all have the ulterior motive of emphasizing the film's already...
...movies aside, Gods and Monsters is undoubtedly worth seeing, perhaps worth seeing twice. It is without doubt the most human film to have come out this season. That is to say, it concerns itself not with explosions, but with people. There is a certain Lolita-esque aspect to Whale's pursuit of Boone--the degenerate European going after the ingenue American--but this is balanced by the film's ultimately sympathetic portrayal of both characters. There's something worthwhile in the tension between a film dealing with homosexual love and a heterosexual audience member: unable to rely on the stock...
...conclusion of the film, the audience mourns for Whale because McKellen and this film have made out of the man--aging, bitter, out of favor with Hollywood--an endearing figure. Stepping outside of the theater, though, one cannot help but mourn for the real James Whale, for the days when a director could make a movie out of a Mary Shelley novel--not for the prestige granted to recent film adaptations of Henry James, but for the quality of a swift story, of one that engages intellectually, emotionally and viscerally. And for the spectacle of a monster given life...