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From our 21st-century perch, most contemporary women have no trouble believing that the great women writers of the 19th century got a raw deal. The first four of Jane Austen’s novels were originally published anonymously—writing was no job for a lady. The Brontë sisters published under masculine names, knowing it was the only way they would be taken seriously. And though Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley virtually invented modern science-fiction with her 1818 gothic novel Frankenstein—completed when she was 19—some scholars have sought to downplay that achievement, claiming that her lover-turned-husband Percy Bysshe Shelley made so many revisions to her manuscript he should be considered a collaborator. These women have at last been vindicated, but it took forever. What if, circa 1936, one of them—from beyond the grave, and wearing some very bad blackberry-hued lipstick—were to become so angry and frustrated with her lot she decided to flip the script by taking possession of a modern woman?
That’s the premise of writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, and you get the idea before the opening credits even roll; you may as well be reading an academic essay that begins, “In this essay, I will….” It’s possible to identify with women’s collective anger and still find its expression in a movie wanting, and that’s how it is with The Bride!, a movie that offers jolt after jolt of orthodoxy, only to leave you feeling limp and spent rather than energized. Ten minutes in, you’ll be able to outline the picture’s themes, SparkNotes-style. After 40 minutes, you’ll be struggling to stay awake through the lecture. That annoyingly emphatic exclamation mark in the title isn’t just there for looks; it’s emblematic of the movie’s overkill.
Jessie Buckley plays two roles here. As the movie opens, we see her in black-and-white, dressed up in early 19th century garb—including a bit of droopy lace stuck to her hair—as she angrily decries her…
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