Mary Shelley is one of the most important figures in the history of English literature, feminist literature, and science-fiction, and should have gotten her own movie years ago. Apart from her masterpiece 1818 novel, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (considered the first work of modern science-fiction), her life was an incredibly fascinating one, swept up as it was in the turbulent lives of the great Romantics. Mary Shelley, a biographic film from Wadjda director Haifaa Al-Mansour should be brilliant, educational, and with the technical and performance prowess to render it an Oscar contender. But it isn’t, which is quite a shame.
The film follows Mary Wolstonecraft Godwin (Elle Fanning), daughter of the late feminist Mary Wolstonecraft and author William Godwin (Stephen Dillane), and her meeting and romance with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (Douglas Booth). Through her experiences with him and the other figures of the Romantic period, as well as her lifelong fascination with the macabre, she is inspired to write her classic Gothic novel.
To its credit the movie gets a lot of the details around the creation of Frankenstein right, such as Mary’s reaction to galvanism and her fear of reanimation, Fuseli’s The Nightmare, and of course the famous Geneva contest with Shelley, Byron, and Polidori. But the actual composition of Frankenstein is given very little attention, only a montage to be exact, and mostly independent of the Geneva holiday. Because the film isn’t so much about her great accomplishment as it is her relationship with Percy. This ties into the themes of Frankenstein, but too much so for my liking, to the degree it does a great disservice to Mary Shelley’s imagination. Despite the movie constantly emphasizing her independence, in things such as her fury at not getting to attach her own name to her novel, this movie doesn’t actually give Mary Shelley much agency. Her creation is defined by her relationship to Shelley, her ideals by a mixture of the influence of Shelley and her father. Ultimately the movie is a romance, the drive, conflict, and resolution all revolving around Mary and Percy’s relationship. This is illustrated especially in a scene where a Frankenstein celebration is interrupted for a reconciliation between the couple -a perfect metaphor for its intrusiveness on what the audience would prefer to see. You could go on about the historical inaccuracies and omissions in this film as well. There’s no mention for example, of Mary’s half-sister, whose death influenced the novel, or her second child who also died young. The timeline is a little skewed and the reason for Godwin throwing out Shelley is changed. And of course with the focus being on on Mary and Percy’s relationship there’s nothing of her career as a novelist following Percy’s death in 1822, which would have been very interesting to explore.
Throughout all this, Mary is played with disappointing staleness by Elle Fanning, who’s not up to the task of carrying the weight of this character. Her English accent, though better than in the likes of Maleficent, is still not good, and it forces her to speak always in a single cadence which inhibits her performance greatly and results in a monotone through a lot of her dialogue. In a film that hinges on the emotional and psychological state of its title character, Fanning can’t carry the movie at all. However, apart from a Maisie Williams cameo with a bad Scottish accent, the cast around Fanning is much better. Douglas Booth makes for a good Shelley, and Tom Sturridge is an ideal hedonistic Byron. Bel Powley is quite good as Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister and Byron’s one-time lover, to the degree I was more interested in her story than Mary’s at times. There are also worthwhile performances from Stephen Dillane as usual, Ben Hardy, and Joanne Froggatt.
Al-Mansour gives the movie a very Gothic atmosphere, akin to something like Penny Dreadful, complete with frequent fades to black, melancholy music, and a bleak production design. And while a dimness in presentation is needed given some of the details of Mary’s life, the movie is conveyed with the tone of dark horror itself. The story of Mary Shelley certainly fits the Gothic mould, but far more Jane Eyre than Frankenstein. There’s an editing device in this movie where scenes regularly cut in the middle to other later scenes. The idea is to thread them by a connecting idea or theme, but it’s just as much used as a means to fast-track development. And even then there’s stuff missing. Mary Shelley wants its feminist text, but can’t afford to devote too much screen-time to it; leaving us with merely one scene of a publisher insinuating Mary couldn’t have written Frankenstein because she’s a woman, and voiceover of others rejecting it for not being suitable subject matter for a lady. Even the fuss about her name not being on the book is framed more as personal pride than a gender discrimination issue.
I was lucky to see Mary Shelley as a double feature with James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein. Ironic, since the former subscribes to the very traditional, accurate form of the novel, while the latter is mostly Frankenstein in name only. Both films are poorly written, but one of them has personality. Watch Frankenstein, then Bride of Frankenstein, which is better, and then for good measure, Young Frankenstein. And read about Mary Shelley, an icon of literature who deserves better than this namesake movie.
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch/
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