Mary Shelley
Haifaa al-Mansour (2017)
It’s a journalistic cliché to describe the leaders of an historical movement as ‘the rock stars of their day’ – the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, say. Or the English Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century. There are moments when Haifaa al-Mansour’s Mary Shelley goes in for cultural updating to comic effect. Mary (Elle Fanning) first claps eyes on Percy Bysshe Shelley (Douglas Booth) across-a-crowded-room and asks her friend (Maisie Williams) who he is; the other girl, groupie-like, answers, ‘That’s Shelley – beautiful, isn’t he?’ In due course, Mary and Percy get to know each other better and she tells him she’s pregnant. ‘Hey!’ he replies, ‘a baby …’ Douglas Booth suggests a boy-band member with lucrative modelling contracts but Shelley strikes a more prosaically careerist note when Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge) invites him, Mary and the latter’s stepsister Claire Claremont (Bel Powley) to Geneva: the younger poet describes this as ‘an unmissable opportunity’. After Percy first reads Mary’s Frankenstein, he tells her the manuscript has ‘so much potential’. His words have the ring of the literary agent who doesn’t want to crush their client’s hopes quite yet.
The verbal anachronisms in Emma Jensen’s screenplay (with ‘additional writing’ by al-Mansour, according to the credits) might be thought designed to reinforce an interpretation of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s life as a feminist parable with twenty-first century implications. In that case, Haifaa al-Mansour would seem exceptionally well qualified for the project. The publisher that eventually accepts Frankenstein, after many others have rejected it, does so on condition that the author’s identity remains anonymous and that the published volume includes an introduction by Percy – to create the impression, in other words, that he, rather than Mary, wrote the novel. When she filmed Wadjda (2012) in Saudi Arabia, al-Mansour was obliged to direct under cover in order not to break the law by appearing in public with her male crew. But Mary Shelley is nothing like single-mindedly feminist. The injustice of obscuring Mary’s authorship is made to seem the consequence of her lack of celebrity as much as of her gender, as the similarly thwarted Dr John Polidori (Ben Hardy) reminds her. (Echoing Polydor, his name inevitably contributes to the rock-stars-of-their-day stuff.) Polidori says he wrote The Vampyre as an attack on the ‘devouring bloodsucker’ Byron – now (in 1819, that is) assumed to be the author of the short story of which he was the target.
Polidori compares his own fate to that of Mary, who has written the tale of a creature’s betrayal by an ‘irresponsible narcissist’ and seen Percy, who answers to that description, take credit for it. Mary Shelley has, if nothing else, presented both Shelley and Byron as consistently egocentric and exploitative in their personal relationships. This dominates at the expense of virtually any suggestion they might have been gifted writers. Both like the sound of their own voice. You get the sense that Shelley’s pretensions as a poet and philosopher are, like his professions of love and loyalty, all talk. What’s in effect the appropriation of Mary’s work is the culmination of this theme but an eleventh-hour U-turn then occurs. William Godwin (Stephen Dillane) – Mary’s political philosopher and publisher father, from whom she’s been estranged, thanks to her relationship with Shelley – organises a literary salon to mark the publication of Frankenstein. Godwin invites Percy and Mary separately to the event – by now, they too are estranged. It’s here that Percy suddenly comes good. He publicly names Mary as the author of Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus and she emerges into the gathering from behind a curtain (geddit?). The happy couple embrace and everything’s OK. They get married and have another child to replace the one that died earlier. (That’s honestly how it comes across[1].) The closing legends stress the happiness of their union, note Percy’s ‘tragic death at the age of 29’, and that Mary never remarried. The scenarist Emma Jensen is also executive producer of the film. She seems to have written the script glancing nervously over her shoulder at different prospective audiences.
Although the screenplay is the fundamental problem, it has to be said that Haifaa al-Mansour’s direction is disappointing independently of that. Until the closing stages, the tempo is pedestrian: al-Mansour works her way through scenes with more duty than imagination. Some negative reviews have likened Mary Shelley to a soap opera but it’s low on soap momentum. After Mary, Percy and Claire have attended a stage demonstration of galvanism and the heroine is grieving the loss of her baby daughter and dreaming she may be restored to life, you expect Mary to get on with Frankenstein but the creation of the famous work is frustratingly delayed. The overuse of an overwrought score (by Amelia Warner) is hardly unusual but al-Mansour’s lack of orchestration of the performances is a more serious and noticeable weakness.
The youth of the cast is refreshing – Elle Fanning, Douglas Booth and Tom Sturridge are all actually close to the age that Mary, Shelley and Byron were at the time – but the results are disappointing. Elle Fanning’s attempt at a posh-ish English accent is accomplished yet imprisoning. It says something that, in the occasional moments when her American voice slips through, she’s more emotionally expressive. Although his bright eyes indicate Shelley’s drug habits, that’s as iconoclastic as Douglas Booth gets. His attempts to get seriously dramatic are effortful. Tom Sturridge’s portrait of Byron could hardly be more obvious – smoulderingly dangerous-to-know at first, then a callous brute with a devilish cackle – though Sturridge at least has more vocal colour than Booth. In the unrewarding role of Polidori, Ben Hardy wears a dark wig that’s perhaps the most disfiguring of its kind since the one Daniel Craig wore as Ted Hughes in Sylvia (2003). The hairpiece makes Hardy look weird and a bit daft.
The difference in age between Bel Powley and the actual Claire Claremont is relatively large but Powley’s performance is by some way the most effective of the younger actors’. The tensions between Mary and her stepmother (one-note Joanne Froggatt) cause William Godwin to dispatch his daughter to Scotland, where she stays with her father’s friend (Derek Riddell) and his daughter (the Maisie Williams character) and first meets Shelley. She returns posthaste to London on receipt of news that Claire has fallen into a catatonic state, which turns out to be faked, precisely in order to get Mary back. The egocentric resolve this requires on Claire’s part nicely anticipates her longer-term determination not to miss out on any of the fun her elder stepsister is having, including a physical relationship with Percy. Bel Powley gives Claire, who also sleeps with Byron and bears his child, an intense but amusing avidity. Rather amazingly in the circumstances, she also makes a lot of her lines sound fresh – modern, if you like, yet not jarringly so. In a different register, Stephen Dillane, as so often a cut above, does the same as Mary’s father.
10 July 2018
[1] In fact, the couple’s next two offspring also died very young. The small boy we see near the end of the film must be Percy Florence Shelley (1819-1889), the only one of their children who survived into adulthood.