_Mary Shelley's Frankenstein_ reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs Kenneth Branagh's version of Shelley's famous novel is elaborately melodramatic, full of grand emotional extremes and hyperreal horrors. No low-key effects here. "The image I keep seeing,'' he says, "is a child in a delivery room, delivered and then abandoned, squealing and screeching.'' As the film is focused through this image, it explores some crude familial obsessions; the abandoned child-monster (Robert De Niro) returns to plague its father-creator (Branagh) with a calculated cruelty. The other focus is the romance between Victor and the Monster, but this is less available on the surface (or maybe it's all on the surface: the film won't get into it). Not incidentally, Victor spends the movie looking very comely, with shoulder-length hair, always-perfectly-clipped beard, and carefully sculpted torso; on one level, his creation incarnates his ugly ambitions. But on another, the repeated showcasing of Victor's handsome physique suggests what the film won't articulate, that the "right'' to live has something to do with how good you *look*. The problems with this politics of prettiness are much more interesting (and more vaguely addressed) than the film's overt agenda, which is based in convolutions of familial connections and abandonments. Victor Frankenstein's desire to "cheat death'' is presented here as a woefully misdirected response to his own mother's (Cherie Lunghi's) death during childbirth. Sobbing over her bloody corpse, his previous dedication to outpacing his father's medical career is reinvigorated. The soundtrack music swells, the camera pulls back and up. It's clearly about vengeance now, Victor's personal fury against the vagaries of fate. There's little wonder that he's somewhat confused about his self-styled mission to reorganize family structures. He's surrounded by father-son-brother figures and would-be mothers and sisters. Engaged to his infinitely lovely "sister'' Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), an orphan who joined the Frankenstein household when both were children, he's also beloved by another almost-sister, the housekeeper's daughter, Justine (Trevyn McDowell). His little brother Willy is like a cherubic son whom he must temporarily abandon in order to go to medical school. And his father (Ian Holme) is left feeble and incapacitated (like another son) by his wife's premature death. Such soap-operatic relations are, I think, supposed to explain Victor's subsequent hysterias. Once installed at Ingolstadt University, he rejects one instructor's opinon that death is final. Rather, he takes up with Professor Waldman (a convincing John Cleese), who's been experimenting with bringing monkey paws to life with electricity. As we all know, Victor goes the next step. When Waldman is killed by an angry beggar, his desparing mentee inserts his father-professor's brain inside the summarily executed beggar's skull. (There's lots of lynch-mob imagery, ignorant crowds lusting for spectacular deaths. This seems the inversion of Victor's lusting for rebirths, but also says something grim and rather ambiguous about audience desires.) At the center of the film is the Monster's outrageous birth scene. Victor dashes all over his attic-lab, stripped to the waist, sweaty and all excited at his impending success. Here Branagh's athletic flamboyance resembles that of Mel Gibson as Hamlet - the robust thinker in manic action - the camera can hardly keep up with him. (Still, Branagh's reading of the necessary line, "It's alive!'' is considerably more subdued than Colin Clive's terrifying declaration in the 1931 Karloff film). When the Monster is delivered from a vat filled with ambiotic fluid, the father and son wrestle together in a slippery, gloppy mess. This is a male birth scene with teeth (and, needless to say, quite unlike the boringly sanitized version in Ivan Reitman's one-joke movie, _Junior_). Quite horrified by his astounding triumph, Victor does the appropriate (maternal?) thing: he passes out. The Monster escapes to the cholera-plagued streets of Ingolstadt, where his physical hideousness (he's all raw red scars and big black stitches) inspires its frightened citizens to run him out of town. Soon enough, like his father, the Monster is bent on revenge and a kind of redemption (this after he learns to read and gets a glimpse of Victor's self- aggrandizing journal: dad must be brought down). As the crazily sewn-together creature (he's no squarehead), De Niro gives an occasionally passionate, more often out-of-place performance, like a scarred-instead-of-tatooed Max Cady (from Scorsese's _Cape Fear_) on another, much more epic rampage. Trundling across the Alpine tundra, he doggedly pursues Victor, who has been convinced by Elizabeth and his best friend Henry (Tom Hulce) to return to Frankenstein mansion back in Geneva. (Which he announces to us - "GENEVA!'' - in such an explicit bow to narrative exposition that audiences invariably laugh at this supposedly dramatic moment.) Framed as Victor's narration to another too-determined fellow, a Captain Walton (the also-pretty Aidan Quinn) who is himself bent on sacrificing his ship's crew to reach the North Pole, the story is at once tragic and ridiculous, mostly mundane in its pacing and imagery. When the Monster decides to wreak havoc on the remaining Frankenstein family - little Willy, decrepit dad, loyal Justine, and increasingly perturbed Elizabeth - Victor goes into what might have been a rocky-horror tailspin, recreating his laboratory at home in order to appease his creation's craving for a female companion. Briefly, the movie seems on the verge of embracing its own campiness, as it is available in the romance between Frankenstein and his creation. But it's sort of too little too late. All the sentimental histrionics up to now make what follows less horrifying than goofy. Elizabeth forgives Victor one more time, they begin a softly-lit wedding night consummation. Their breathing speeds up, their bodies glisten. Not a chance. Victor hears the Monster's ominous flute-playing off in the distance: the father-son (or, alternative couple) showdown is inevitable. Later for heterosex. That this showdown takes place over Elizabeth's dead body is the point, of course (given the hammered-home moral that Victor has messed with natural birth processes and she's the last remaining emblem of Victorian normalcy and domesticity). When a resurrected and supremely uglified Elizabeth is caught -literally - between her two mate-options, her dilemma is much more engaging than anything else we've seen or will see. The Monster embraces her for her enchanting terrible-ness. Victor insists that she "say [his] name.'' What kind of options are these for her, a once-perfect beauty now transmutated into infinite unsightliness? Suddenly what has been implicit all along is obvious on the surface: this is less about being dead or alive than about being beautiful or hideous. *This* narrative (of plastic surgery? of aerobicized acceptance? of what it means to be an acculturated woman?) is the real tragedy. Elizabeth knows it and makes the only possible choice. If only the film had known it was a riff on the ruthlessness of Gothic fashion mandates. Cynthia Fuchs teaches film and media studies at George Mason University. Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author. This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.