Gods and Monsters': The Urbane, Gay Father of 'Frankenstein'
"Gods and Monsters" features a performance by Ian McKellen that richly deserves to be remembered at the end of the year. Like John Hurt in "Love and Death on Long Island" (giving a similarly splendid performance, though in a narrower role), he works wonders with the character of a marvelously urbane English homosexual who becomes obsessed with an Adonis from a different world. In this case, it's Brendan Fraser, also impressive, as the hunk who mows the lawn.
It happens that the English gentlemen in both these films find themselves incongruously embroiled in American popular culture. This time, it's the still-grand Hollywood of 1957, the year the director James Whale, whom McKellen plays, met his mysterious death. It was Whale who directed the famous Frankenstein movies.
("I just directed the first two," he points out tartly here. "The others were done by hacks.") Over the course of a long career, he also painted, worked as an actor and made many other films (among them "The Invisible Man" and the original "Waterloo Bridge").
Taking off from Whale's complex nature and the unknown circumstances of his last days, the film adapts Christopher Bram's hypothetical novel about the filmmaker into an immensely touching character study that is heightened by well-chosen glimpses of Hollywood's past. Written and directed by Bill Condon, who had his own fling with tongue-in-cheek horror when he made the oddball "Strange Behavior" and "Strange Invaders," "Gods and Monsters" creates a deeply resonant portrait of Whale and the gay Hollywood of his era.
One day, while having a marvelous time playing cat-and-mouse games with an overeager young interviewer visiting him at poolside (the Whale pool is used by its owner strictly as an instrument of seduction), Whale succumbs to a small but debilitating stroke. He is physically unimpaired afterward, as coy and debonair as ever, but his mind has begun playing tricks. Sudden sensations and painful thoughts of the past begin to overwhelm him, in a manner that Condon illustrates with haunting grace. (Carter Burwell's beautifully mournful score enhances these moments.) At the same point in his life, he sees a tempting opportunity when the gardener appears outside.
"Suppose we say phooey to the hedges!" Whale suggests to handsome Clayton Boone ( Fraser). "Can you spare an hour after lunch to sit for me?" Clayton, who proves a more multidimensional figure than might be expected, is suspicious at first of Whale's desire to draw him, but the old slyboots does a dauntless job of getting under the young man's skin.
Condon is at his most impressive when weaving their peculiar bond into the spirit of the Frankenstein movies, something he does with tenderness and insight. An inspired section of the film finds all of its principals watching "The Bride of Frankenstein" on television and responding to it in revealing ways.
Condon segues through memory into the moviemaking process itself. Real Hollywood figures (Elsa Lanchester, Boris Karloff) are ably impersonated. Particular attention is paid to George Cukor, a target for Whale's cattiness and an emblematic figure in the closeted gay subculture of his time.
With a cast that also includes Lolita Davidovich as Clayton's occasional girlfriend and Lynn Redgrave, warmly attentive and unrecognizably plain, as Whale's devoted housekeeper, "Gods and Monsters" has been capably made in all regards.
What especially elevates it is the razor-sharp cleverness of McKellen's performance, which brings unusual fullness and feeling to a most unusual man.
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