Gods and Monsters: Movie Review (2008)

Editor's note: Another film worth revisiting. Below is my original review from 1998.

In late spring, 1957, when director James Whale was found face down in his Pacific Palisades swimming pool, his lungs may have been heavy with the water that killed him, but his body--rigid and bloated from death--was nevertheless impeccably groomed in a smartly styled suit.

He chose to die as he had lived--with a measure of dignity underscored with drama. Wittingly or not, he staged his death very much like a Hollywood film--specifically the opening scene of “Sunset Boulevard,” which had premiered just seven years earlier and which loosely paralleled Whale’s life: It was a film about a person no longer wanted by Hollywood, something Whale knew a thing or two about as it was his unwillingness to conceal his homosexuality that ultimately ruined him.

Perhaps the director took his life because he wanted another moment in the press. Perhaps he did so because he knew in his mischievous heart that nothing sets tongues wagging faster in Hollywood than a day-old corpse. Whatever the reason, speculation about the cause of his death became Hollywood lore. Did somebody--perhaps a jilted lover or a murderous hustler--kill Whale, the director of “Frankenstein” (1931), “Bride of Frankenstein” (1935) and “The Invisible Man” (1933)?

Or did he end his own life himself?

Bill Condon’s excellent film, “Gods and Monsters,” based on Christopher Bram’s speculative novel, “Father of Frankenstein,” cuts through the lore and answers that question in short order: His mind turning with loneliness and despair, dementia and sadness, Whale (played superbly by Ian McKellan in an Academy Award-nominated performance) plunged headfirst into that pool and deliberately breathed in that water, ending what had been, in the 1930s, a celebrated life.

But Condon’s film, which closely follows the book, also has its share of fictional dish, fleshing out Whale’s character by introducing Clayton Boone (Brendan Fraser), a gardener, into the Englishman’s life. Young and strapping, his flattop haircut, square face and rugged build reminiscent of Whale’s monster, Boone also is a kind of god for Whale--the Greek type.

Here, in this deeply resonant, nuanced film, the two men discover through their own unique relationship and in a series of Whale’s flashbacks that our lives are but threads connecting us to gods and monsters, those relationships that shape who we were into what we’ve become. With the Academy Award-nominated Lynn Redgrave as Whale’s fiercely protective housekeeper, the film is marked by its performances, sparked by its humanity, driven by the past and fueled by the interior calamity of Whale’s present. It is not to be missed.

Grade: A-