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BY KIM MORGAN |
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Gods and Monsters Rated R Opens Friday, Dec. 25 When Hollywood was an exotic wonderland filled with pioneering expatriates such as Fritz Lang, Erich von Stroheim, Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, director James Whale flourished--for a time. Born in late-19th-century Britain to a working-class family, Whale led an eventful life. He fought in the trenches in World War I, was held as a prisoner of war, studied art, painted, worked as a cartoonist and acted with prestigious companies on the London stage, where he received critical acclaim. It was in Hollywood, however, that he achieved worldwide renown--some would say to his chagrin--as the director of Frankenstein. Whale came to Hollywood in 1930, and his career took off with the talkies revolution. A man who could certainly talk (he worked as a dialogue director for films such as Howard Hughes' Hell's Angels), Whale played the uppercrust English gentleman to perfection and mostly kept secret his lower-class upbringing. But there was one thing he did not keep secret, unnerving both studios and friends: his homosexuality. The industry put up with it when he made the enormously successful films Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and The Bride of Frankenstein. Hollywood was less accommodating, however, after he made The Road Back in 1937, a failure over which Whale claimed to have lost creative control. After he dominated most of the 1930s, Whale's career was finished, and in the 1940s he spent his time painting, dawdling and haunting his gorgeous house in Pacific Palisades. In 1957 a stroke left him withered and mentally touched, and not long thereafter Whale was found face down in his swimming pool, just like William Holden's character in Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder's twisted ode to old-school Hollywood. He had drowned himself. We can only speculate what his last years were like. According to Bill Condon's Gods and Monsters, Whale may well have been the real Norma Desmond, only smarter and more sympathetic. Adapted from Christopher Bram's novel Father of Frankenstein, a fictionalized account of Whale's declining years, Gods and Monsters is an engrossing, hilarious and touching portrait of what the late director may have been up to before his wet death. Ian McKellen stars as Whale, who spends his final months in idle isolation under both the stern control of his longtime Hungarian housekeeper Hanna (an almost unrecognizable Lynn Redgrave) and the hallucinatory effects of his stroke medication. He is physically frail and soon to expire, but Whale is not without reflection, spite and, as the picture pithily reveals, spirit. His fits of leering wit are brought on by the hiring of a gardener named Clayton (Brendan Fraser), a beautiful, unsophisticated young man who is flattered by the former director's fawning attention. Whale begins their unusual alliance by painting a portrait of the gardener (to Clayton's delight), later using him as a trophy companion. Clayton is a tough but tolerant straight man. He is disgusted and scared by Whale's homosexuality at first, but he soon comes around; he likes the guy. Through his initial defensive reaction and later acceptance of Whale, the movie provides more than a few parallels between Whale's homosexuality and the movies he created. Whale's monsters were outsiders like the director himself--not evil, but rather gorgeously eccentric, sympathetic and darkly humorous. When Whale watches a late-night showing of Bride, he revels in what he created and what he got away with during the 1930s. He also gloats at times over the honesty that deemed him an outcast; when Clayton meets a princess at a party thrown by George Cukor (a closeted Hollywood homosexual played by Martin Ferrero), Whale exclaims, to Cukor's embarrassment, "He's never met a princess before. Only queens." Some beautifully photographed flashbacks relate Whale's experiences in an affecting collage of overlapping images. The warfare-lit sky of WWI metamorphoses into the blinding lightning storm in Frankenstein; Whale's soldier lover becomes Clayton the gardener. The acting is similarly excellent. McKellen is brilliant as usual,
with the right mix of strength and vulnerability; his Whale is a man
we should not merely feel sorry for. And Fraser holds his own impressively
with the great McKellen. His disarmingly nice and innocently sexual
manner makes us believe that he would truly accept and even relate to
Whale, however different the two are. A dramatic and elegant ode to
Whale, Condon's film reveals the essence of a tortured man through his
monsters.
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