Mary Shelley

I was interested in seeing Mary Shelley, a 2017 film, more because I am interested in the subject matter, as the film did not get good reviews. I would agree that the film is not that good, as it seems inert, dutifully covering a period in the writer's life but not delving terribly deeply into the subject.

It was directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour, who was the first Saudi woman to direct any movie. Certainly she must have seen parallels to the role of a woman in Saudi culture and what Mary Shelley went through, but these comparisons miss the point of her life, I think, and especially of her writing Frankenstein, which of course is the central part of the plot.

Shelley (she is known as Mary Godwin throughout the film, which is one problem with the title) was the daughter of William Godwin, a leading intellectual of the time, and Mary Wollstonecraft, a feminist writer who died giving birth to Mary. We see her at sixteen, enjoying ghost stories, and giving her stepmother a pain. She is packed off to Scotland to live with a friend, where she meets a young poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. They fall in love, but she finds out he's already married. They decide to live as a couple anyway, shocking the establishment and even earning her father's scorn, though he too was a believer in free love.

Mary is interested in science, and at a demonstration of galvanism we can see the wheels turning in her head. She and Shelley are invited for the summer to the villa of Lord Byron on Lake Geneva. He is having an affair with Mary's step-sister Claire. As we have seen in many other movies, Byron announces a contest for writing a ghost story. Mary has a dream in which a creature is brought back to life. She sticks with the story, but to get it published it has to be anonymous, and then everyone thinks that Shelley wrote it.

The film bends over backwards to have Frankenstein tied to her own life, which is fair, I guess. Certainly Shelley was the model for Victor Frankenstein, a man who blunders ahead without reckoning on the consequences. The novel's theme of abandonment--the creature is created and then spurned by its father--is tied to Mary's own abandonment. But some of this seems too cut and dried.

The film takes fictitious liberties--Mary did not meet Shelley in Scotland, and Shelley did not receive news of his wife's death the very night of the ghost story contest--but this was to be expected. Despite these changes, the film just never picks up any momentum, and trudges from one scene to another.

The acting is generally good, especially Elle Fanning as Mary. Douglas Booth looks appropriately moon-eyed as Shelley, and Tom Sturridge paints Byron as a scoundrel quite well. I was interested to see that Ben Hardy makes John Polidori, Byron's physician, a model of propriety, as most accounts have him as a reprobate.

As mentioned, this is the third film about the writing of Frankenstein I've seen, following Gothic and Haunted Summer. I'm still waiting for a film that tells the story well.