GODS AND MONSTERS (58)

Directed by: Bill Condon

Starring: Ian McKellen, Brendan Fraser, Lynn Redgrave

The Pitch: An elderly James Whale (director of the FRANKENSTEIN films) lives a reclusive life in Hollywood, and tries to seduce - or perhaps just bond with - his young gardener.

Theo Sez: Never trust a film that makes a point of marking out its subject-matter as complicated, therefore not easily reducible (invoking BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN to warn against the simplistic view that "funny is funny and scary is scary", or Redgrave's definition of a happy ending as one "where the bad people die and the good people live") : it usually means the film-makers never managed to get a coherent shape out of the material. Like Whale's addled mind this "goes off in a hundred directions", some fascinating and others less so, making it hard to decide whether it's a hollow film with memorable detail or a profound film with sloppy detail : the basic thesis is certainly intriguing - Whale, haunted by the horrors of WW1, engaged in a kind of lifelong mating-dance with Death, making the FRANKENSTEIN films as a kind of vicarious necrophilia - but there's also his homosexuality to talk about, and his working-class background, and his memories of Old Hollywood (cue gratuitous celebrity gossip - and by the way, George Cukor looked nothing like so professorial), not to mention his feeling of always being different, like the Monster, "noble and misunderstood". Fine performances - McKellen's the kind of over-burnished tour de force (but a tour de force nonetheless) where every line and gesture has been thought-out - but a bit of a jumble, not particularly moving ; small felicities abound, though, from the revelation of Whale's gayness deftly sandwiched between two POV shots aimed at his hunky gardener (we read more into the second, naturally) to the quiet way he appropriates a line from BRIDE ("Would you like a cigar? They're my only vice"), paraphrasing it for the occasion. Amusing.