There
is a chapter devoted to Percy Bysshe Shelley in Paul Johnson’s The Intellectuals, so it is probably
safe to assume he was difficult to live with. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin would
agree. Her scandalous relationship with the poet brings her no end of grief.
Yet, she can also recognize his merits. It is a complicated relationship that
eventually inspires one of the greatest literary monsters of all time. Godwin’s
artistic development and her eventful early years with her future husband, most
definitely including the fateful 1816 summer in Lake Geneva, are dramatized in Haifaa
Al-Mansour’s Mary Shelley, which
screens during the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival.
Mary
Godwin never knew her mother, feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, but she
always took pride in her nonconformist principles and lifestyle. By the same
token, she instinctively recoiled from her stepmother’s puritanical attitude.
Ironically, this made her a willing target for Percy Shelley’s seductions.
Despite the fact he was already, strictly speaking, married, they openly
consorted together in a very public romance. Naturally, it severed her
relationship with her philosophically permissive but personally righteous
father, but her sister Claire Clairmont remains loyal. In fact, she will do her
best to follow Wollstonecraft Godwin’s example with Lord Byron, which explains how
all three came to be Byron’s guests at his Swiss villa.
At
least three films have been devoted to that literarily significant summer, but
Ken Russell’s Gothic is the one cineastes
will most likely compare with Mary
Shelley. Arguably, it is Dr. Polidori who gains the most stature in Emma
Jensen’s screenplay and under Al-Mansour’s direction. In fact, the respect and
sympathy that develops between him and Wollstonecraft Godwin might even be the
most memorable element of the film.
On
the other hand, Tom Sturridge’s Lord Byron is considerably creepier and more
predatory than Gabriel Byrne’s in Gothic.
It is hard to fathom spending more than one night as his houseguest, but it
needs hardly be said, they were not thinking very clearly during this time.
Somewhat
playing against her arrested-development-teenager type, Elle Fanning is much
more forceful and confident as the titular Mary Shelley than you might expect,
which is a very pleasant surprise. She also develops some convincing
dysfunctional codependent chemistry with Douglas Booth, who is perfectly cast
as the snide, self-absorbed Percy Shelley. Sturridge is flamboyantly sinister
as Byron, while Ben Hardy and Stephen Dillane provide dignity and humanistic
reality checks as Polidori and Godwin, respectively. Alas, Maisie Williams does
not get enough screen time as Wollstonecraft Godwin’s Scotts friend Isabel
Baxter, whereas Bel Powley’s petulant Clairmont quickly tries our patience.
Obviously,
there is a pronounced feminist angle to the Wollstonecrafts and Al-Mansour’s
film. Much has been made of parallels (arguably over-exaggerated) between chauvinistic
Nineteenth Century England and the misogynistic Saudi setting of Al-Mansour’s
debut, Wadjda. Yet, there are also
echoes of the Percy Shelley and Lord Byron that Johnson would have us know. We
definitely see a dramatic disconnect between the poets’ lofty rhetoric and
their frequently appalling behavior. “Free love” might sound great in
pamphlets, but it is more problematic when introduced into real relationships.
Yet, there is also a theme of responsibility running throughout the film. At
one point, the future Ms. Shelley will express the sentiment, if not in so many
words: she made her bed, so now she will have to sleep in it.
Of
course, Mary Shelley is in no way
intended to be a horror movie, but you have to give Al-Mansour credit for
including some rather sinister and cinematic hat-tips and pre-figuring sources
of inspiration. As a result, Frankenstein fans (which is surely all of us, right?),
should feel a warm attraction to the film. Indeed, it is quite a classy looking
and cliché-challenging period drama. Highly recommended, Mary Shelley screens again tonight (4/29), during this year’s
Tribeca Film Festival.
