EMPLOYER DIGS HUNK GARDENER

By ROD DREHER
New York Post
11/4/98


IS there anything Ian McKellen can't do? In "Gods and Monsters," he gives an extraordinarily nuanced and dryly unsentimental performance as retired filmmaker James Whale, the director of "Frankenstein" (1931), "Bride of Frankenstein" (1935) and other horror films, who died a suicide in the pool of his Hollywood mansion in 1957.

Riffing on themes in the self-made Whale's peculiar life, writer-director Bill Condon's absorbing and highly original story (based on "Father of Frankenstein," Christopher Bram's 1995 novel) imagines Whale's final days as an elderly gay libertine whose flesh, his only comfort and pleasure in life, is failing him.

Once the toast of Tinseltown, the silken dandy spends his time alone in his tasteful digs, forgotten by his friends and colleagues, but too worldly and self-aware to ripen and rot gloriously, a la Norma Desmond. Arch, elegant and brittle, he looks like a dessicated dragonfly.

Whale alights upon his muscular new gardener, Clayton Boone, played with great subtlety by the underrated Brendan Fraser. He fascinates the younger man with his stories of Old Hollywood, but the gardener becomes tense as a Rottweiler when it finally - duh - occurs to him that Whale might have more in mind than trimming the hedges.

The gardener's simple mind and hulking body (to say nothing of his boxy head) are obviously meant to suggest the monster, and the movie clearly presents Whale as the mad doctor Frankenstein and Clayton as the lump of flesh he attempts to electrify to do his bidding.

The possibility that the randy coot is trying to manipulate cloddish Clayton into serving him sexually gives "Gods and Monsters" a spark of danger. But the movie has something more perverse and fascinating on its mind.

The ongoing collapse of Whale's increasingly frail mind causes long-buried memories to unearth themselves like zombies. There he is as a young sorcerer, conjuring movie magic on the "Bride of Frankenstein" set.

We later see him as a child, slogging through the dull brutality of the English working class. There he is again, serving in the British army in the Great War, and seeing a young man he passionately loved killed in the trenches.

Whale's flight to America, and subsequent career as a pseudo-posh sybarite and member of Hollywood royalty, appears driven by his desperation to evade the agonies of mortality. And what better laboratory for this ambitious immigrant to set up in than a town and an industry dedicated to the beautiful image and eternal youthfulness?

Whale becomes both a Frankenstein figure creating new life - his own - and a lonely monster of his own creation. "Gods and Monsters" is a strange, wonderful movie, a quintessentially American tale.