Butler's Cinema Scene

Douglas Booth and Elle Fanning as Percy and Mary Shelley

“MARY SHELLEY” My rating: C 

120 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Men are shit.

At least that’s the moral of “Mary Shelley,” a biopic in which Elle Fanning portrays the author of Frankenstein.

The facts of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s life are plenty fascinating. She was born in 1797 to philosopher and political writer William Godwin (Stephen Dillane) and feminist and free-love advocate Mary Wollstonecraft, who died shortly after giving birth.

As Haifa Al-Mansour’s film begins, young Mary is torn between her professorial father and a wicked stepmother (Joanne Froggatt, late of “Downton Abbey”) who wastes no opportunity to harp on the sexual immorality that is young Mary’s inheritance.

One day a dashing young poet named Percy Shelley (Douglas Booth) drops by Papa’s bookstore and the teenage Mary is smitten. He’s romantic. He’s smart. A secret affair ensues.

All is not smooth.  Percy is married, Mary discovers. And his bohemian lifestyle has led to his being cut off from his family’s wealth.

But so enraptured is our heroine that she runs off with him, bringing along her desperate-for-excitement stepsister Claire (Bel Powley).Little by little Mary — and the viewer — realizes that Percy is not what she thought.  Theirs is a hand-to-mouth existence; when they are forced to flee creditors in the middle of a rainstorm, their newborn daughter catches her death of cold.

And for all his talk of equality and open relationships, Percy is at heart a cad, capable of mental and even physical cruelty.

His circle of acquaintances aren’t much better.  Writing buddy Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge, looking suspiciously like Edgar Allan Poe) has an affair with the eager but unseasoned Claire, then contemptuously drops her.

Only one member of the Byron/Shelley bunch seems to have any real moral moorings.  John Polidori (Ben Hardy) is a good-hearted physician with literary aspirations. His work on a horror story, “The Vampyre” dovetails with Mary’s growing obsession with the reanimation of dead matter that will finally blossom in her  masterpiece Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus (which, ironically, was first published anonymously since no one at the time could countenance a young woman coming up with such a hair-raising and morally twisted yarn).

As this brief synopsis suggests, Mary Shelley led a tumultuous life.  But despite a fine physical production and cinematography (by David Ungaro) that nicely captures the glum English pall and cramped interiors, the film is  a dramatic drag.

Perhaps this is inevitable; this is the story of a young woman corrupted by a selfish man. Yes, she triumphs in the end through her literary genius, but her personal life is right out of Poor Pitiful Pearl.

The performances are okay — the young cast is attractive but nobody hits it out of the park — and after a while one wearies of our heroine as a punching bag.

| Robert W. Butler