GODS AND MONSTERS (1998) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Bill Condon
Ian McKellen, Brendan Fraser, Lynn Redgrave,
Lolita Davidovich, Arthur Dignam, David Dukes,
Kevin J. O'Connor, Rosalind Ayres, Jack Betts,
Cornelia Hayes O'Herlihy, Martin Ferrero
The last days of James Whale, the Hollywood director who made a couple of monster movies everybody's seen, retired when he couldn't control his own work anymore, and turned up dead at the bottom of his swimming pool in 1957. The movie opens with Whale (Ian McKellen), old, frail and recovering from a stroke, looking out the window of his modest but beautifully appointed home. He perks up visibly when his gaze falls on a hunky new gardener named Clayton Boone (Brendan Fraser) who's come to mow the lawn. The rest of the movie's about the relationship between the two men, the openly gay Whale and the adamantly straight Boone, with Whale's devoted housekeeper (Lynn Redgrave) running interference now and then. Both men are a little contradictory (and more alike than it might first appear), and Condon does a nice job of conflating Fraser's character with the Frankenstein monster, but the results aren't entirely convincing. Flashbacks to the making of "Bride of Frankenstein" aren't convincing, either, for anybody who's seen "Bride of Frankenstein". (Nobody could really do Elsa Lanchester except Elsa Lanchester, though Arthur Dignam as Ernest Thesiger isn't bad.) There were rumors of foul play after his death, but Whale did leave a suicide note, and it's generally believed that, faced with failing health and a deteriorating mental state, he conducted his own demise.
