Every decade or so, someone comes up with a definitive recreation of Mary Shelley’s classic tale of the misuse and abuse of science and the ultimate redemption that occurs when the creator realizes his mistake.
This may very well be one of the finest reimaginings of the tale.
Daniel Radcliffe, still trying to shed the stereotype of playing Harry Potter, stars as Igor, the pitiful hunchback, whose origins in this story have him playing second banana in a troupe of clowns at a traveling circus that has set up just outside of London.
Gifted with an uncanny sense of anatomy, the then nameless clown saves the life of a performer who nearly breaks her neck after a tragic fall. And he does it with a doctor standing over him who sees the situation as hopeless.
The doctor is Victor Frankenstein played with the gusto bordering on insanity required by actor James MacAvoy who is probably best known to date for playing the young Charles Xavier in the two X-Men prequels.
Frankenstein graciously takes the young medico under his wing and promptly cures the young man’s deformity, even going so far as to assist him, though straps and belts, to correct his faltering posture. Victor also gives him a name, that of his former roommate, Igor.
As repayment, Igor takes refuge in the doctor’s manse and agrees to assist him with his experimentations which involve restoring dead tissue to life with the use of electricity.
That sets the stage for the events that ensue. And anyone familiar with the story will have some idea going in just what the consequences for Frankenstein’s impudence will come from his evident scientific arrogance.
While Frankenstein’s character will always suffer from some apparent lack of sanity, this story attempts to humanize Igor with fantastic results. Frankenstein may indeed be the creator of the monster, but Igor is the doctor’s correction — even his conscience one might say — in activities better left for more omnipotent beings.
After all, you can’t correct God’s mistakes or shortcomings in the human body. No matter how hard you try.
What makes the movie work so well are the multiple facets that inhabit all of the characters here. Igor is perhaps the most complex, trying on one hand to appease the Doctor in his zealous assistance to create something marvelous. At the same time, though, he cautions the doctor on his vanity and overreach.
Then, there’s the detective who investigates the pair’s escape from the circus during the first act. Seeing what is transpiring, Turpin cautions Frankenstein that he’s meddling in the affairs of God, a plea that obviously falls on deaf ears.
Andrew Scott, who plays Turpin, realizes the futility of his efforts and pays for them with his own overzealous approach to fixing the problem. The actor also appears in the new James Bond installment too and the similarities in character are quite intriguing to say the least.
The directors obviously tried to conjure up some of the visuals so prevalent in earlier versions of the story, including the crowd scene where Frankenstein’s lab is attacked. The story is sequentially different and the pitchforks are conspicuously absent.
I suspect this story will do poorly on the big screen because of audience familiarity with the story (it finished 12th at the box office this past weekend) but once the film hits DVD or Netflix, I believe it will gain a following fairly quickly despite the story’s predictability.
This is a quality reworking of the classic tale and it deserves its moment in the spotlight, even though the monster should remain in darkness. I give “Victor Frankenstein” four out of five stars.
