Review: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

In our world of heart transplants, test tube babies and designer genes, Mary Shelley's 1816 novel, Frankenstein, seems remarkably prescient. Raising questions about the dawning of technological advancement, Shelley captured the fears and wariness people had about the consequences this advancement may bring. Now, 178 years later, the novel serves as both a blueprint and a warning to a society that is still hungry to discover the unknown.

Regardless of any scientific, philosophical or theological musings contained in the novel, Shelley's Frankenstein has and always will be classified as a horror story. Certainly all of the film versions, including the definitive 1931 version with the indelible Boris Karloff, have taken that approach. Irish wunderkind Kenneth Branagh, despite professing to follow the novel faithfully, ultimately falls into the path his predecessors followed.

The Arctic Sea, 1794. Captain Robert Walton (Aidan Quinn) and his crew are trapped in a raging storm. Afterwards, his ship becomes frozen in the icy waters. Intent on reaching the North Pole, he presses his exhausted crew to chop the ice from the ship. They meet the weatherbeaten Victor Frankenstein (Branagh), who warns them to escape. Forced to explain his rantings, he proceeds to tell Walton a most terrifying tale, one to "curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart."

Devastated by his beloved mother's death, Victor promises to defy the very process of Death itself by creating Life: "No one need ever die. I will stop this." His increasing obsession is festered during his studies in Ingolstadt where he encounters Professor Waldman (A Fish Called Wanda's John Cleese in an effectively subdued performance), who conducted illegal experiments in his youth.

Although Waldman has discovered a way to reanimate the lifeless, he dissuades Victor from pursuing his experiments any further. After Waldman is murdered, however, Victor forges ahead, fueled by his need to fulfill his obsession. Using his mentor's brain, the body of Waldman's hanged killer and various other body parts, Victor constructs his Creature (Robert De Niro).

Meanwhile, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter who, with Lady Jane, A Room With a View and Howards End to her credit, has become quite expert in these dramatic costumers), Victor's adopted sister and secret love, becomes concerned about his lack of correspondence. Justine (Middlemarch's Trevyn McDowell), the housekeeper's daughter infatuated with Victor, advises her to go to Ingolstadt despite the raging cholera epidemic.

Once there, Elizabeth is turned away by a filthy and fatigued Victor who refuses to abandon his work: "It must come first." At her departure, he proceeds with the final stage of his grisly experiment. His dank laboratory lit by tremulous blue flashes, Victor injects electrodes into the corpse's head, feet and chest. Astride the copper chamber in which the body is encased, his anticipation short of orgasmic, he urgently coaxes the Creature: "Live, live, live!"

However, in the moment where Creator meets creation, mother meets child, Victor realizes his impotence as he grapples with the cumbersome Creature amidst the amniotic fluid. He abandons the Creature, hoping that it has died during the cholera epidemic. The Creature, however, will not be denied. At a later confrontation, he warns his Master: "I have love in me, the likes of which you can scarcely imagine. And rage, the likes of which you cannot believe. If I cannot satisfy one, I will indulge the other."

Branagh wants to entertain you, and this should come as no surprise from the man who's made such highbrow Shakespearean fare as Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing pleasingly accessible to audiences. Unleashing his camera, he presents us with a dazzling display of dissolves, quick edits, zoom-ins, zoom-outs -- you name it, it's in here. Visually resplendent and teeming with pretension, Branagh's film achieves the unabashed grandness of the old Hollywood films.

Branagh's production team doesn't let him down. Oscar winner James Acheson (The Last Emperor, Dangerous Liaisons) creates a wide array of costumes, from Elizabeth's breathtaking ball gowns to the Creature's dark, dirt-soaked cloak. Indeed, the cloaks and capes are stars in their own right, exuding a balletic expressiveness and symbolism. At one point in the film, Elizabeth's red velvet cloak becomes an extension of her own blood as Victor carries her limp figure up that great, ridiculously lengthy, winding staircase that is the centerpiece of Tim Harvey's amazing production design. Save for a few exterior scenes (shot in England and on location in the Swiss Alps), Harvey and art director Martin Childs had the enormous task of creating a number of large scale sets, including the Frankenstein manor and the town of Ingolstadt.

Branagh the actor is robust; his best scene occurs towards the end when Victor breaks down, thoroughly besieged by the consequences of his actions. Bonham Carter's fierce fragility is displayed to full advantage in her showstopping final scene. It is during this sequence when the love story, which had played like a second-rate Wuthering Heights, achieves a freakish conviction.

De Niro, nearly lost in the fantastic makeup replete with zigzag stitches and squashed mouth, supplies the Creature with poignancy, dignity and repulsion. The scene in which the Creature not so much speaks the word "beautiful" as chokes on it is the most moving in a film where the smaller moments (like Justine's rushed hanging) bespeak a more horrifying evil.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Directed by: Kenneth Branagh

Written by: Steph Lady, Frank Darabont; adapted from the novel by Mary Shelley

Starring: Robert De Niro, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hulce, Helena Bonham Carter, Aidan Quinn, Ian Holm, John Cleese, Richard Briers, Cherie Lunghi, Celia Imrie, Robert Hardy