<\/p>\n
The Bride!<\/em> is that rare beast: a total misfire from a long list of artists so talented and well regarded that they should, like the film they are in, be festooned with an exclamation point or two. Maggie Gyllenhaal\u2019s follow-up to the stunning (but much smaller) The Lost Daughter<\/em><\/a> simply contains way too many tones, ideas, and approaches to ever work, and many of these are at war with each other. The Bride!<\/em> is a love story and<\/em> a rewrite of the Frankenstein myth and<\/em> an action film and<\/em> a murder mystery and<\/em> a crime comedy and<\/em> a rejoinder to Yorgos Lanthimos\u2019 Poor Things<\/em><\/a>. Its vision of Prohibition-era Chicago is Chicago and<\/em> Manhattan and<\/em> Weimar Berlin. The film is built around a scaffolding of over-the-top homages to other films, causing it to career off one stylistic cliff after another. During one sequence in a dance hall, I wrote in my notebook, \u201cOh, it\u2019s like \u2018Puttin\u2019 on the Ritz\u2019 in Young Frankenstein<\/em><\/a>.\u201d Five seconds later, the big band on-screen struck up \u201cPuttin\u2019 on the Ritz.\u201d Yet for all this wild, sometimes deliberate tastelessness, The Bride!<\/em> also wants to be a serious meditation on love, female messiness, and the limits put on women\u2019s lives. It aims to be both a camp classic\u2014the end credits music is, of course, \u201cThe Monster Mash\u201d\u2014and a serious feminist work. As a result, it comes across like Joan Crawford pausing partway through Johnny Guitar<\/em> to give America Ferrera\u2019s speech from Barbie<\/em>.<\/p>\n Embodying this fascinating patchwork of ideas good and bad is the Irish actress Jessie Buckley, who will soon find herself in the odd position of winning an Oscar for a serious prestige movie while she is also in multiplexes with the most controversial performance of her career thus far. As the titular Bride(!), Buckley is tasked with playing multiple roles, sometimes simultaneously. She begins the film as the ghost of Mary Shelley, informing the viewer\u2014in what can be described only as an unfortunate act of hubris on Gyllenhaal\u2019s part\u2014that what we are about to see is the story Shelley would\u2019ve told if she had only had the guts and not died of brain cancer. Her performance is high camp, like something out of a Hammer horror film, complete with overenunciated consonants, wicked smiles, and the excavation of Buckley\u2019s lower vocal register. She next appears as Ida, a young call girl for the Chicago mob. Before too long, Ida is possessed by Mary Shelley, and Buckley switches on a dime from good-time gal to enraged Fury, spouting Shakespearean torrents of verbiage and puns. After she is killed and resurrected, she plays Ida again, but this time broken and amnesiac, with bits of Shelley breaking through without warning. At another point, she channels Marlene Dietrich for reasons I cannot now recall.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a huge performance, as massive and maximalist as anything in Nicolas Cage\u2019s filmography<\/a>. And while her work in the film is almost certain to inspire debates, I find it incredibly brave. Buckley has built the kind of career that would allow her to go on dancing on the wild edge of tasteful prestige movies, but in The Bride!<\/em>, she is so committed to the task at hand that she delivers a performance that transcends petty questions of good<\/em> or bad<\/em>. Perhaps most impressively, in The Bride!<\/em>, Buckley also exists beyond any sense of being embarrassed about her work.<\/p>\n Acting is the most human of art forms, the one that, via imagination, experience, language, and the body, portrays and confronts the human condition in all its varieties. As being a human being is often mortifying, acting is thus also<\/em> one of the most embarrassing things a person could possibly do. There\u2019s a reason why we call overly sincere people theater kids<\/em>. What could be worse than actually wanting<\/em> attention in a world where public speaking frequently tops lists of people\u2019s worst fears? The secret is: A lot of actors are afraid of public speaking too. That\u2019s why we have the actor\u2019s nightmare<\/em>, a dream in which you are going to perform in a play but realize at the last minute that you do not know your lines, nor do you remember rehearsing it. The last time I had this dream, I was unable to learn the script because someone kept knocking at my door to tell me that the late Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O\u2019Connor wanted to speak to me. I went out to see her. She said hello, and I began uncontrollably weeping. Embarrassing!<\/p>\n Acting holds way more potential for humiliation than either public speaking or telling someone your dreams. You\u2019re pretending to be other people for a living. But it is only in letting go of this embarrassment that you can begin to pretend so well that your lies tell the truth, and other people forget that you\u2019re pretending. You appear to be simply living within the world of the script. There\u2019s a word for this, and because it was coined by Konstantin Stanislavski, it\u2019s a Russian word: perezhivanie<\/em>. It means \u201cexperiencing\u201d (or perhaps \u201creexperiencing\u201d). It\u2019s the acting version of the flow state, or being in the zone\u2014it is the moment when the actor and character meet, the self and self-consciousness fall away, and the actor is fully in tune with the moment. Almost every major doctrinal debate in acting in the past century has been over how to most reliably enable actors to reach this state, whether that\u2019s using their own life experiences and memories (Method acting), learning how to radically be in the moment (the Meisner technique), relying on imagination, textual analysis, and research (the Adler technique), or living as your character full time, a technique that doesn\u2019t really have a name but is usually associated with Daniel Day-Lewis<\/a>.<\/p>\n Perezhivanie is so powerful to witness because we get to watch an actor transcend themselves. As a self can be a burdensome fardel to bear, this transcendence holds out hope that we mortals sitting in the audience could be graced with a similar moment. Through art, we could be taken out of ourselves and into something more mysterious, and brilliant, and beautiful, and strange. But the routes one takes to get there are often, you guessed it, pretty embarrassing. Or, as Harvey Keitel once told the New York Times of being an actor: \u201cWe do some things that might be construed as voodoo, but nevertheless it gets results.\u201d<\/p>\n Few actors get these results like Jessie Buckley. I have rarely seen an actor so easily able to experience<\/em>, to render a character\u2019s messy humanity in a way that is still coherent and controlled, as if she were at once a deep-sea diver plumbing the unconscious and<\/em> the boat waiting to take them back ashore. As her recent awards haul for Hamnet<\/em><\/a> shows, I\u2019m not the only one who feels this way. Every actor I talk to gets a little glassy-eyed when her name comes up; the words queen<\/em> and goddess<\/em> tend to find their way into the conversation. She is clearly one of the greatest actors (if not the<\/em> greatest actor) of her generation, one who has demonstrated versatility while operating at a consistently high level. After receiving her start as a runner-up on a reality show judged by Andrew Lloyd Webber<\/a>, she\u2019s gone on to appear in musical theater, in Shakespeare, in films large and small. In every one of these roles, her performances not only fit the character exactly; they make those characters so fully her own that it\u2019s hard to picture anyone else playing them.<\/p>\n This is true even when she plays a role that\u2019s hundreds of years old, as she did in the National Theatre\u2019s Romeo & Juliet<\/em>. Filmed over 17 days in the National during lockdown, and available to stream over National Theatre Live<\/a>, the film\u2014and Buckley\u2019s performance\u2014is a revelation. Not only does she render the verse with the felicity of everyday speech, but she finds layer upon layer with the role. Her Juliet begins as the cleverest person in her household, trying to reason her way through a world that doesn\u2019t make much sense. As she loses all control\u2014first through falling in love, then through being betrothed to her cousin against her will\u2014a profound loneliness and desperation seeps in drip by drip until her suicide seems not only inevitable but understandable. Her chemistry with co-star Josh O\u2019Connor is also off the charts.<\/p>\n