Mary Shelley
by Emma Jensen and Haifaa Al-Mansour (additional writing by)
BFI Film Fund
Mary Shelley is on iTunes and Amazon, so I finally got to watch it. It’s not great. The casting is perfect but the history is inaccurate, even though the historical truth is so scandalous that it begs to be made into a movie. Seriously, any Mary Shelley movie that doesn’t show her losing her virginity to Percy Shelley on her mother’s grave is a waste of time and talent. That really happened. It’s a true historical fact. She wrote it down in her diary. You had one job, movie, and you settled for some kissing and a butt grope. Shame on you.
The movie starts with Mary at home with her family in London. She, being a teen, is a snot to her equally snotty stepmother. As a result Mary is shipped off to Scotland, where she and Arya Stark (fine, Isabel, played by Maisie Williams) swig wine out of bottles and meet Percy Bysshe Shelley at a party. Say what I will about this movie – the chemistry between Mary and Shelley (played by Elle Fanning and the gorgeous Douglas Booth, respectively) is undeniably fantastic. It seemed likely that they would just go to it under the dining room table five seconds after meeting. On the other hand, I could also picture Mary and Isabel running off together to become pirates, which would have been a much more exciting movie.
Anyway, Mary has to go home because her step-sister Claire has been pretending to be dying while actually she is just bored. I’ve been writing and speaking a lot this year about the life of Mary Shelley and those around her, and while that didn’t actually happen, it’s certainly a Claire-like thing to do. It’s Classic Claire and I respect it as such. Anyway, Shelley shows up and woos Mary with poetry and politics in such a starry-eyed way that my 45-year-old self cannot stop rolling my eyes but my sixteen-year-old self is all “Give me 5 minutes to pack! We’ll live on love!”
It doesn’t hurt that Douglas Booth is both pretty and emotive. Behold:
Sadly, Mary was sixteen at the time (both historically and in the movie), not forty-five, so off she goes, and then everything falls apart. This includes a dead baby (I admit I skipped this part a little) and Mary suspecting that Shelley cheats on her with Claire, while Claire is treated horribly by Lord Byron and Polidori (Byron’s doctor and an aspiring writer) just looks depressed (which, in real life, he was).
It all culminates in Mary writing Frankensteinin one long burst of female rage, after which she’s denied the credit for having written it, because men are shits.
(#NotAllMen#ButAllMenInThisMovie#ExceptPolidori#PoorGuy).
Look, no one can rant about Percy Shelley with more female rage than I. However, he never claimed credit for the book, as the movie implies. He never even let people think that he wrote it (which of course they did) without rebuttal. He edited it just as Mary edited his essays and his poetry, and he never claimed to do more than that. So basically the movie takes a marriage full of actual conflicts and replaces them with a pretend conflict. This is especially frustrating if you happen to know that the ONE THING Shelley did consistently well as a husband was support Mary’s writing. There’s a scene in which Shelley finally publicly announces that Mary wrote the book which causes the two to reconcile and I rolled my eyes up so far up in my head I’m surprised they didn’t fall out and scare the cats. Poor Elle and Douglas act the shit out of it but even they can’t sell it.
One thing happens in the movie that I WISH had happened in real life. In the movie, Shelley’s wife, Harriet, shows up and tells Mary to stay away from Shelley (Mary and Shelley have been “living in sin” all this time without being married because Shelley is married already). Basically she says a lot of dialogue amounting to, “Good Lord, you are an idiot.” I loved it. You go, Harriet.
I must also tip my hat to Tom Sturridge, who plays Byron as incredibly odious and unattractive but with a secret self under it all. He respects Mary in a way he respects no one else – which, interestingly, was also true to life most of the time. Anyway, he’s just as awful as I always pictured him being (which is pretty damn awful) but with just enough “My douchebaggery is a mask for my inner turmoil” so that you can see why some women drool on him.
Generally, it’s unfair to review a historical film with nothing about complaints about how it got the history wrong. Biopics and history films are not documentaries. Their job is story first and facts second. But the thing is, most of what the movie invents is much less radical and interesting than what really happened. The movie is frustrating and flat because of this. The clothes are fine. The cinematography is standard. That said, I declare that from this day forward, no movie about a writer will be allowed to have them reciting their lines in voice over while an actor pretends to write them down. Enough already.
Mary Shelley is a standard biopic that removes almost everything interesting from the people it’s depicting. Good acting, though. I look forward to seeing all these people in better things soon.
Douglas Booth reminds me of the gloriously terrible Jupiter Ascending. Gods I love that movie.
When can we expect a knitting pattern for the hat? 😉
Such a bummer to hear this. I find a lot of biopics don’t live up to their potential. I think the whole Mary-Percy-Byron-Claire thing would make more sense as one of those limited-series type things, where it can have some space and time to breathe.
I’ve always thought a biopic about Mary Shelley and Mary Wolstoncraft-Godwin would be amazing. I mean, it wouldn’t be a hundred percent historically accurate, but it would be a fun framing device to have Mary Godwin-Shelley learn about her mother through her mother’s diaries, whilst also being wooed by Percy Shelley.
My favorite story (though this one might be more rumor than truth) is Mary Shelley allegedly learned to spell her own name by tracing her mother’s headstone. (Second favorite is totally the ‘had sex with Percy on her mother’s grave’ story.)
My favorite fictional accounting of Mary Shelly’s life is Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein by Molly Dwyer. I highly recommend this book. The trailer for this movie isn’t too bad but, if it gets that much history wrong and if it leaves out the deflowering (does it say anything more about her mother than that she is dead?), I may pass on it. Thanks for the review.
The thing about taking away all the real issues and replacing them with stuff that’s less interesting is a pet peeve that keeps happening (see Mansfield Park adaptations). Hollywood dumbing-down strikes again?
Everyone should read ‘Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley’ by Charlotte Gordon. It was fantastic. I wish I had 100 copies so I could just go around shoving it into people’s hands.
I was also impressed with the acting but not quite satisfied with the film.
I will say that when Byron finally came onscreen with his douche-liner, fur coat, and pouty face, I laughed out loud because it was perfect.
I’m incredibly dissapointed that this one ended up being imperfect. I actually found the bit about the book hilariously offensive. Write about her struggles with publishers if you need a “pioneering feminist makes seminal work of art” movie, producers!
Did they leave out Shelley’s actual, proven serial philandering (and yes, I know it was possible he and Claire had an affair; I mean beyond that!)?! He was off seeing a lover of his when he drowned, for heaven’s sake!
I keep wishing they’d do a movie about Claire’s life. That woman SUFFERED but she lived!
@Sarah F – my other rec for a Mary biography is “The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein.” We get a glimpse at the other figures in the drama with a lot of centering on Mary and Claire.
I kind of figured that this would suck 🙁 but as a librarian I also ran with it, and used it as a vehicle to suggest all sorts of cool things about Mary Shelley and/or Frankenstien reworkings. So, like, it gave me something to work with, at least, and I appreciate that.
The film begins in a promising manner but then descends into soap opera frippery. There is phenomenal chemistry between Elle Fanning and Douglas Booth. The very best part of the film is in the first 30 minutes and their courtship. Then their marriage descends into utter misery for Mary Shelley. She realizes she has married a selfish, self absorbed, smug libertine who wants an “open marriage” and encourages her to have sex with his best friend! That never really happened in real life and the liberties the filmakers take with the facts was quite annoying. By the time Lord Byron is introduced I realized this was just a Hot Mess!
The cinematography, set design, costumes and casting was excellent. Tom Sturridge offers a hammy overwrought portrayal of Lord Byron. He is portrayed as an oaf, leering, invasive, rude to a fault. Byron was temperemental, mercurial but not this oafish lout the movie posits.
The most thankless role goes to the actress who was stuck playing Claire Clermont, Mary Shelley’s half sister. She is the Third Wheel who seems to be just a forlon, hapless little kid with looking into a window, with her nose pressed against the glass, peering at the fascinating people who completely ignore her. The real life story of Claire Clermont had much pathos, tragedy and it was very complex. The film skims over the liasion between Claire Clermont and Lord Byron in a Paint By Numbers manner. Claire is immediately smitten by Lord Byron the first time he meets her when he creepily sticks out his tounge at her, leering at her…then he dumps her and walks off with his other female companions. Byron was not the buffoon the film portrays him as. It is a horrible performance, over the top and made me cringe. Tom Stafford wears excessive amounts of kohl eyeliner and his appearance is buffonish….Byron is always drunk or leering at Mary Shelley, who finds him excreble and he makes her flesh crawl. The creepiest scene is when Byron tries to seduce Mary Shelley right in front of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
The TRUTH was that Byron and Percy Bysshe Shellly were best friends, like blood brothers and there was NEVER any infidedlity between Mary Shelley and Byron. There has been speculation that Byron and Shelley were gay lovers for a time, but Shelly was devoted to Mary and the sexual liasion between the two men was quite brief. The film then completely falls apart with far too much excess and a meandering script which put my feet to sleep. The last 30 minutes was a snooze fest. A huge disappointment was how the film portrays the historic night during a thunderstorm when Mary Shelley wrote the first science fiction novel “Frankenstein” almost in one night…Weak Tea and All Sauce and No Stuffing.
Elle Fanning is an excellent actress and the casting of Douglas Booth was perfect – the two of them have genuine chemistry and both do their best with a muddled script and faulty direction. There was a BBC film of Lord Byron in the 1990s that was EVEN WORSE – despite Johnny Lee Miller with Douglas Hodge as Byron starring who couldn’t save that film. Another BBC film about Beau Brummell features Lord Byron but once again, the over the top, loutish characterization of Byron just curdled my girdle. I’ve studied his life, his work since I was a teenager and he was NOT this addled, obnoxious, oafish, boorish lout whose overwrought hystrionics sucked all the oxygen out of the room. I’ve never seen a film about Byron that was accurate and gave him credit for being a literary genius in the same league as Shakespeare, Milton and Christopher Marlowe.
I rate the film a C plus – with a different screenwriter and director and NOT Tom Sturridge cast as Byron this film could have been a success. I toughed it out to the end, sort of the same way you watch a train wreck – just to see how bad it gets. Visually the film is beautiful to watch but seriously flawed, inacurrate historically, blah blah blah..at least I did not waste money on buying a ticket to see this film in a theatre – it is on You Tube as a free movie.