Gods and Monsters (1998)
Starring: Ian McKellan, Brendan Fraser, Lynn Redgrave
Director: Bill Condon
Synopsis: Semi-Biopic of one of cinema's unsung and unique talents
Reviewed by: Omar Khan

 

 

The previous year Ian McKellen, the distinguished British stage actor enjoying something of a late-blooming film career, received a thoroughly deserved Academy Award nomination for his magnificent portrayal of director James Whale in Gods and Monsters. It is remarkable that the same actor who appeared so strangely uncomfortable in the Stephen King adaptation Apt Pupil could deliver two performances so utterly different within such a short space of time. Here, however, McKellen is simply superb, producing one of the finest performances of recent years.

James Whale is remembered today primarily for the remarkable films he directed during the 1930s. Several were major commercial successes in their day and have comfortably survived the passage of time to become acknowledged classics of the horror genre. Amongst his greatest achievements are Frankenstein (1931), which transformed Boris Karloff into an international star, and its even more extraordinary sequel, Bride of Frankenstein, a film many still regard as the finest horror movie ever made.

Whale was one of the very few openly homosexual men working in Hollywood during an era when such openness was almost unheard of. Although successful and respected within the industry, his sexuality inevitably attracted gossip and prejudice, and his later years became increasingly private as illness gradually overtook him.

His death remains one of Hollywood's enduring mysteries.

Found drowned, fully clothed, in his own swimming pool, Whale's death has long been the subject of speculation. Suicide, accident and even darker possibilities have all been suggested over the years. It is these final weeks of his life that director Bill Condon chooses to explore, adapting Christopher Bram's novel Father of Frankenstein, which imaginatively speculates upon the events leading up to Whale's death.

Condon's Whale is a witty, cultured old man whose failing health has done little to diminish either his sharp intelligence or his appreciation of masculine beauty. His quiet existence is unexpectedly disturbed by the arrival of Clayton Boone (Brendan Fraser), a strikingly handsome former Marine employed to tend the gardens around Whale's home.

Boone's physical presence immediately fascinates Whale, but the relationship that develops between the two men is far more complex than simple attraction.

Boone, entirely heterosexual and initially somewhat wary of his employer, gradually finds himself drawn towards the lonely old director through a mixture of curiosity, sympathy and genuine affection. Whale, meanwhile, becomes increasingly haunted by memories of his own youth—his impoverished upbringing in England, the ridicule he endured for being different and, above all, the horrors he witnessed while serving in the trenches during the First World War.

These memories become inseparable from the monsters that later populated his greatest films.

At heart, Gods and Monsters is both an affectionate portrait of a remarkable filmmaker and a moving study of loneliness, memory and mortality. It suggests that Whale's experiences—his sexuality, his outsider status and the unimaginable trauma of war—were all woven into the extraordinary imagination that produced some of horror cinema's greatest masterpieces.

Beautifully written, sensitively directed and graced by a magnificent central performance from Ian McKellen, Gods and Monsters is a poignant, intelligent and deeply affecting film that pays fitting tribute to one of cinema's true originals.