“Frankenstein” blistered in Guillermo del Toro’s eye

Frankenstein by Guillermo del Toro was released directly on the Netflix platform this weekend, two and a half hours of a story that is both faithful to the novel and bloated with slightly suffocating additions, as if this story of a humanoid creature created then abandoned by a megalomaniacal scientist was not enough. Certainly it has been adapted for the screen many times, but is this a reason to add hand-to-hand combat with wolves, climbing towers in the middle of a storm and other scenes apparently borrowed from various blockbusters, nothing is less certain. A film therefore undoubtedly dispensable, but which gives us food for thought on what spectacle is today, on what impresses us, and what we believe that impresses us.

We’ve all made the mistake at least once: Frankenstein is not the creature but its inventor, a proud Viennese baron who lived at the beginning of the 19th century. At the threshold of the film, he finds refuge, injured, in a ship immobilized by the ice floes of the North Pole, pursued by a creature that no weapon, no soldier, can kill. During a few hours in the shelter, he tells the captain his side of the story. A few years earlier, he conceived at the risk of his life, and above all his reason, a new man, based on complex anatomical theories, bodies taken from the battlefields, and a lot of money lent by a financier as cynical as he was syphilitic. But as soon as the creature is finished, and despite its apparent success, Victor Frankenstein hates it, decides to destroy it and flee. End of the first part.

At this point we’ve already been there for 1h15, watching actors – and mainly Oscar Isaac who is a good actor – freewheeling in sets of considerable kitsch and all tinged with green as is now the case with big auteur blockbusters; and a second part begins. Too bad we are exhausted because it is more interesting, which offers the version of the creature, this immense nameless man, a creature whose intelligence, sensitivity, thirst for knowledge and of course, love we discover.

Tourbillon

This multi-voiced structure exists in Mary Shelley’s story. The first novel, Frankenstein or the modern Prometheuspublished anonymously in 1818 in England, an astonishing novel which integrates several stories – the film is content to superimpose them, but it is in fact quite faithful in its unfolding and its main issues, to the original. Much more in any case than a whole bunch of cinematographic adaptations before it, those with Boris Karloff in the title role in particular, which portrayed a creature barely gifted with words, an ugly monster suffering from his ugliness. One of the biases, unfortunately much too bordered by Guillermo del Toro’s film, is to have chosen to interpret the monster Jacob Elordi, one of the actors who today represents absolute masculine sensuality, a sensuality which sometimes comes to the surface, but too little, whereas it would have been stupid to make him the center of a story which was written by a young woman of barely twenty years old at the dawn of the 19th century.

Unfortunately this aspect is drowned in a whirlwind of not well assimilated motifs, we barely touch them before they evaporate under a new twist or a new reference: the context of the first mass wars, syphilis and its ravages, aristocratic morality after the Revolution, the link between the creature and the animals – one issue chases the other. The gothic and philosophical tale, so clear, almost realistic in Mary Shelley’s version, and all the more terrifying, is adorned with a whole bunch of crude things. So we can always console ourselves by saying that Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation is, like its subject, a hybrid and monstrous film, but this little rhetorical pirouette hardly helps to pass the excessively long time that this lasts. Frankenstein.