Mary Shelley is a period biopic about the titular author’s two years prior to writing her iconic Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Elle Fanning plays the famous author as she emerges from childhood determined to follow desires, which leads to unexpected sorrow and disappointment inspiring her to write characters that would capture imaginations long after its author’s demise at fifty-three years old.
Mary Shelley is a Sid Davis social guidance film with the money to be set in the Romantic period. The title is a bit of a misnomer since she does not marry until the end of the film off screen. She is a dash of Belle meets Cinderella and meets her destiny when her father sends her to Scotland to be herself and restore household harmony. She understandably loves Scotland-walks, writing and wine. She meets Shelley, a radical reform poet, and the rest is history as she embraces her parents’ unconventional morality.
Films like Mary Shelley irk me. If you do something widely considered immoral in the name of true love, judgment is wrong, but the minute that things get truly racy, that same person is clutching her pearls in silent, grim disapproval at everyone else and cosplays a dissatisfied housewife. A brief Google search indicated that the movie superimposed this reality on to the author, who seemed to be more of a free spirit than this film would have you believe and actually had a biological half-sister whom she was not as close with but played an instrumental role in her life. By the end of the film, any viewer will walk away believing that the author was chastened and disavowing the evils of liquor, sex outside of marriage and anything resembling polygamy in her greatest work. As a teetotaler (except mimosas), eternally single hater of debt who thinks that most people do not understand friendship so any romantic relationship is doomed to failure, the moralizing detracted from the biopic.
Mary Shelley failed in depicting close women friendships. If you are the kind of woman who brings a friend when you get married, you are unusual. Instead the film seems more concerned with showcasing how the author is the fairest of them all. If you as a woman friend accept that she should be the star of even your movie as the underutilized Game of Thrones’ Maisie Williams’ character does, then you are good and exist solely to move the protagonist forward. Otherwise, any other woman, even her closest friend whom Bel Powley plays, is jealous competition who cannot be trusted around her man and should be viewed with suspicion. Fanning gives great side eye as the school marm of her group of revelers. A solid movie makes the supporting characters as fleshed out as the main characters.
Mary Shelley is effective at shaking viewers out of their predisposition to think that a period piece means that all the people were drinking tea and being proper. This film effectively conveys that a vacation in Switzerland was not just spent discussing books and having mild walks around the garden. The movie perks up when the author trades wits with others on her level such as Lord Byron and Dr. Polidori. The only one in this film who seems to have experienced fun and therefore can depict it on screen without immediately collapsing into a pile of regrets, angst and self-recrimination is Tom Sturridge. His take on Lord Byron is enjoyable. If the film fails to float, I blame Douglas Booth for seeming like a pretty boy who could not string two words together if his life depended on it. When Dr. Polidori decided to show him that he could do some harm with his words and hands, I was here for it.
Fanning does an admirable job as the author, but I think that she had more to give than what was demanded. When an actor was on her level and gave her something to work with, she got interesting. “I’ve never reconciled how someone as strong as my mother was so vulnerable when it came to love.” When Byron does his usual show boating about love and pain, she disdainfully replies, “you poets.” Maybe Fanning should have made Mary Shelley. Fanning clearly envisioned her character as someone more than a heartbroken teenager and a mourning mother. We begin to see this gritty, hardened survivor who knows that she is better than these guys who are full of bravado and will toss her pages at their head as if to say, “This is what a real writer does. Writes!” You could see the seeds of her take on feminism as she turns towards something more substantial than having fun.
Unfortunately the creators of Mary Shelley do not understand what most women know. Women get more interesting and radical as they age, and we do not even get to see the author in her twenties. Instead the movie ends unrealistically as if it was a fairy tale in the middle of a book reading with declarations of love while no one else seems to mind or notice in the smallest room ever. After everything that we just witnessed, why would anyone want them together again?
Mary Shelley’s momentum is leading to an act of repentance, a commitment to monogamy and marriage, abandoning a libertine lifestyle for the love of one woman. If I wanted to see a woman become a Jesus like figure whose suffering is aimed at redeeming one man, I would watch a Lars von Trier film. I do not care about their love or his character.
I was surprised that Haifaa Al Mansour, the first Saudi Arabian woman, director, directed Mary Shelley. One of her subsequent films, “Nappily Ever After” (2018) is in my queue. I am not going to judge her on one film, especially since she did not write the screenplay. While it was a beautiful film, there were no visual moments that particularly stood out. I will judge Emma Jensen who seems to be part of the school of thought that being a woman is primarily defined in terms of pain and failed relationships. I am not a fan of the fairest of them all feminism in which only one woman gets to be special, the others are stereotypes, and the reward is to hang with the guys. It feels like internalized misogyny feminism that defines a woman’s quality by how men receive her. It was worth watching Mary Shelley to learn about how unconventional her upbringing and values were. The idea that a wife on holiday writes a ghost story evokes a very different image than the one conveyed in this film. It provides an excellent starting point to learn about how these historical figures were not as well behaved as the popular image of the period would have you believe
