Frankenstein's Foster Father
A speculative story about a classic movie director is no simple tale of Hollywood.

GODS AND MONSTERS
With Ian McKellen, Brendan Fraser, Lyyn Redgrave
Based on the novel by Christopher Bram
Written for the screen and directed by Bill Condon

JIMMY WHALE GREW UP north of London and soaked his bread in a jar of fatty drippings from last night's roast, just like all the other poor kids who had to eat every scrap they could find. He enjoyed reading and drawing, but his family pulled him from school at age 14 and forced him to work in the turn-of-the-century factories of gray industrial England.

He went to war, fell in love with an impossibly handsome, blue-eyed soldier, lost him to a bullet, became a newspaper cartoonist, worked as a stage actor, went to Hollywood, made famous movies--and then saw his career fade.

Now it's 1957, and Whale (Ian McKellen) is a cagey old man with fine white hair, living with modest elegance in a Hollywood home, recovering from the effects of a stroke, remembering his melancholy past in disturbing, uncontrollable flashes - and impatiently waiting to die.

His severe housekeeper (Lynn Redgrave in an amusing character role) protects him like a son and grimly tolerates his affection for men. Then a delicious young gardener (Brendan Fraser) pricks Whale's interest, and the two men--worlds apart in age, experience and desire--forge a friendship that takes them on a journey into all manners of personal, cultural and political history.

Bill Condon's most extraordinary drama, Gods and Monsters, is a speculation on the last days of the director James Whale, who made Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein and The Invisible Man, three beautifully nuanced horror films of the 1930s that defined their genre and their time. Whale has long been identified as gay, though little is certain about how he lived his homosexual life in Hollywood at mid-century (he died in 1957 at age 61).

So Christopher Bram wrote a novel leading up to Whale's drowning death in his swimming pool, and Condon has filmed it with poignant complexity. Stylish and coy, with a passionate climax that takes place, quite appropriately, on a "dark and stormy" thundering gothic night, Gods and Monsters raises a catalogue of things to ponder and discuss.

But it's not didactic or bookish, and it's filled with moments of gentle, mysterious humanity. You leave it with a sense of having witnessed a private life and a moment of our cultural past, even though little--if anything at all--of what happens in the film actually took place. And rare among gay-themed films, Gods and Monsters is relentlessly homoerotic. It asserts Whale's unceasing desire to delight in the company--and the bodies--of attractive men, and it reassures us that sexual desire needn't fade with age.

This creates a problem at first for Clayton Boone, the brawny bairn who becomes the object of Whale's gay gaze. But Clayton is rather lost himself: Brighter and more curious than his drinking buddies, he's still just out to get laid by any barmaid who'll have him. He's been to war, just like Whale, and so he grows cautiously fond of the affable old man.

Though Condon hints that Clayton may be denying some gay cravings of his own, there's much more to the young man's fascination with Whale, who's so candid about his sexuality that he causes Clayton to flee for a while in anger and disgust. What emerges from their enigmatic friendship is a slice of many lives. Clayton is a working kid with an uneasy past who doesn't quite know what to make of the slick Hollywood scene around him. Whale is lost in memory: He's having visions of his dead wartime lover, and he tries desperately not to swoon for the stunning young man, whom he suspects he'll never have.

There's some fun in the movie for the film buffs, too. Clayton and his friends watch Bride of Frankenstein at a bar, mocking its dated flamboyance at first, then getting caught up in its fierce emotions. And at a party thrown by George Cukor, the legendary (and much more closeted) gay Hollywood director, Whale reunites with Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester, his stars from the two Frankenstein movies.

These Silver Screen moments are kitschy and smart, but they're not the heart of Gods and Monsters. Condon's film is most rare when it speculates on how Whale made a life and career for himself at a time when homosexuality was a taboo and a torment for people afflicted with it.