Starring: Elle Fanning, Douglas Booth, Bel Powley, Ben Hardy, Tom Sturridge, Maisie Williams
Distributor: Transmission Films
Runtime: 120 mins. Reviewed in Jul 2018
| 
| 
‘Mary Shelley’ spends two laborious hours conveying the non-insight that authors imbue their works with their own life experiences. Jerking between Mary’s unconventional romance with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, her struggles against her rigid society and its deeply ingrained patriarchy, and her quest to forge her own authorial voice, this is a biopic that spreads itself too thinly to offer much insight. This disappointment is particularly acute given that the film boasts a female writer, director and star, a rare arrangement that only underscores its squandered potential to mirror the status quo for women working in creative industries today, workplaces that have yet to achieve equality.
Emma Jensen’s screenplay races through its brief introduction to Mary’s life in London. Aged 16, Mary (Elle Fanning) spends her time visiting her mother’s grave, begrudgingly performing domestic duties with her half-sister Claire (Bel Powley), and devouring volumes of ghost stories. When Mary’s father (Stephen Dillane) soon packs her off to Scotland to keep her out of the way of her bristly stepmother (Joanne Froggatt), the reason for the film’s impatience is clear: everything before her meeting Percy Shelley (Douglas Booth) is secondary.
The film, with its strong focus on the relationship between Mary and Percy, understandably lives and dies on the performances and chemistry of its two leads. By this measure though, the project is as dead as Frankenstein’s monster. Neither Elle Fanning nor Douglas Booth ever convince in their respective roles, their romance coming across more like a theatre camp project than a life-changing love. When Percy follows Mary back to London, taking an apprenticeship under her father to surreptitiously continue their romance, his actions seem more creepy than romantic. That Mary is taken in by this man, even after the eventual arrival of his estranged wife and daughter, doesn’t do much to bolster Fanning’s so-so performance nor convey Mary’s noted strength of character. Her philosophical position akin to free love (a stance adapted from her late mother) suggests a bold thinker, but her meek acquiescence to an unlikable and deeply flawed Percy undercuts this.
While Mary Shelley was eventually hailed as a feminist icon of sorts, noted both for her bold foray into a literary genre deemed inappropriate for women and her unconventional living arrangement with a married man, the film fails to capture her pioneering vigour. Because Fanning and Booth lack much spark, their bucking of societal expectations comes across as childish and misguided, not helped by Percy’s foolish financial recklessness. Instead of being a woman marching to her own beat, Mary is rendered blind by Percy’s verses, seemingly struck lovesick by the poetry of a character with little behind his pretty façade.
The plot meanders towards the birth of Mary’s most famous creation, ‘Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus’, replete with the well-known beats like her patronage of a live galvanism show and the short story competition proposed by Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge) during their jaunt to Switzerland. While the famous nightmare that sparks her idea is effectively staged, the relatively lifeless staging (excuse the puns) of most of these moments make it feel like screenplay is simply ticking the necessary boxes. Mary and Percy’s tumultuous relationship also feels utterly detached from reality, such are the extremes that they traverse and the dullness of the performances.
The presence of Sturridge doesn’t help, his Byron a cross between Jack Sparrow and the Marquis de Sade, only pushing the relationship drama further into heightened unreality. Some of the other supporting players earn good marks, but their contributions can’t sustain interest in the inert drama at the heart of the story. Stephen Dillane lends Mary’s father a distracted air of intellectual concern, while Bel Powley and Ben Hardy (as Lord Byron’s physician, Dr John Polidori) impress amongst the younger cast members, perhaps because they never feel like they’re just “playing olden days”.
The costumes and sets ably convey the right period, and Amelia Warner’s score hits haunting and stirring notes as required, but these trimmings cannot patch the holes at the heart of this story. If one wants to know the real Mary Shelley, there are far better ways to understand the author than through this film. Indeed, ‘Mary Shelley’ stresses repeatedly that her most famous work presented great insight into her mind and the experiences that shaped her, so intimate that it surprised even her lover and closest friends. Take the hint: save yourself the two hours and read the book instead.
Callum Ryan is an associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film & Broadcasting.
12 Random Films…
