Mark Reviews Movies: MARY SHELLEY

Become a fan on Facebook Follow on Twitter

Review by Mark Dujsik | May 31, 2018

Emma Jensen's screenplay for Mary Shelley gets around the inherent problems of telling a story about a writer. It does so by mostly ignoring the actual writing. In the case of this particular writer, it makes sense. Mary Shelley wrote more than just Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, but it was her first work of any real significance (and what significance, at that) and her last work of any real fame.

This biographical movie takes place in the years before the author set pen to paper on what would become one of the most accomplished and noteworthy horror stories of all time. Before that, according to the movie, her life was one of tragedy—feeling responsible for the untimely death of her mother—and scandal—engaging in a romantic relationship with the already-married poet Percy Bysshe Shelly. Death, feelings of abandonment, and notoriety became common for the young author, and those things helped to define Frankenstein's narrative, its monster, and its vainglorious protagonist.

For so long, director Haifaa al-Mansour's movie allows the audience to see those connections between the novel and its creator, without bringing undue attention to them. We're simply watching the teenage life of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin unfold, knowing what she will accomplish in a few years and being drawn into the ways that her life seems like a miserable counterpoint to the works of the Romantic poets she admires, befriends, and loves.

The juxtaposition of the poetry and the dreary reality of Mary's life makes for a solid dramatic through line, as well as a subtle piece of literary analysis. As the poets dream and write of a world of intellectual idealism and the inherent beauty of the natural order, among them, waiting in the wings, is a girl, who has become much older in spirit than her age, preparing to warn the world about the dangers of selfish intellectual pursuit and attempting to bend nature to will of man.

Mary, played with quiet assuredness by Elle Fanning, is 16 at the story's start, living in London with her father William (Stephen Dillane), her stepmother Mary Jane (Joanne Froggatt), and her stepsister Claire (Bel Powley). Like Mary's father, her late mother was a famous writer. William runs a struggling book shop—his days of rebellion against social mores behind him.

For her part, Mary believes in her parents' old ways of thinking about love and romantic relationships—that people should love whomever and however many people they choose. That's put to the test while she's on a sojourn in Scotland, where she meets Percy (Douglas Booth). The two quickly fall in love, and Percy follows Mary back to London to become her father's apprentice.

As it turns out, Percy is married to Harriet (Clara Charteris), who warns Mary that she was once young and in love with the man, and has a daughter. Mary doesn't care. As long as she and the poet love each other, nothing else should matter. She and Percy decide to embrace being ostracized by polite society, finding an apartment and bringing along the eager-to-be-free Claire. Percy keeps up his cosmopolitan manner in the ways of romance, but Mary believes she has found a true and singular love in the poet.

There's more than a bit of naïveté to Mary in the early parts of her story. In the ways she has decided about a more expansive ideal of love—before she has even experienced it—and she clings to a man who's essentially a walking warning sign, Mary seems little like the type of person who would shortly go on to write an empathetic and rather cynical horror tale about the human condition. The rest of her story, before coming up with the idea of her novel, is one of poverty, betrayal, resentment, and disillusionment. She comes to suspect Percy, who seems to have no regard for anyone but himself. She gives birth to a daughter, only to have her lover's financial dalliances (which seemingly are as prominent as his romantic ones) send the family into the deathly cold. Her peers, mainly Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge), look down upon her for her gender.

It's a convincing enough portrayal of Mary's life. It's enough so that the eventual sparks that ignite her imagination to write about a mangled, resurrected monster come as a bit of a surprise. Jensen and al-Mansour (credited with some additional writing on the script) have more concern about Mary's philosophical and emotional evolutions, as well as the specific concerns of living as a woman in the 19th century, than the author's circumstantial inspirations for her novel. The approach serves both the author and her work far better than what could have been turned into a point-by-point list of trivia about the book's creation.

Once those rainy days and ghost stories at Byron's Geneva villa arrive, though, the movie begins to find some distrust in both the audience and Mary herself. Mary Shelley spends most the third act explicating everything that the movie had shown us about the author's life, and for some confounding reason, the climactic scene of revealing the novel's authorship turns into a confessional, redemptive moment for Percy. The movie stops feeling like Mary's story brought to thoughtful life. Instead, it starts to feel like Mary playing second fiddle to her work and the man she loves.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the Soundtrack (Digital Download)

Buy the DVD

Buy the Blu-ray