Gods and Monsters: A

Like a death rattle do the weighty themes supporting Bill Condon's beautifully rich elegy Gods and Monsters move throughout the film. They aren't self-serious and they move with no unpalatable heft (which is a relief, considering such subjects as lost innocence and the relationship between art and its artist number among the crowd), rather they wrap slowly around the picture, strangling the one man at its center: James Whale (Ian McKellen, turning decorum into, paradoxically, both a pained facade and a ribald comedy) -- the Golden Age director of Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein and a whole other host of films you've no doubt heard of but never seen. Condon, as writer and director, is the man behind the scenes grappling and managing how exactly the various tendrils of memory and sorrow must seep into the story of Whale's last days of life, and doing so is a tricky prospect. But he pulls it off with fluid grace, inter-cutting the forward momentum with backward -- longing -- glances at the Great War, or the filming of Bride. So great is his achievement that though much of Gods and Monsters is sad, it's never somber.

The audience begins at what are well probably the last few weeks in the life of what was once one of Hollywood's biggest directors. Famous as an auteur of horror (a phrase coined so many decades after his rise and fall that if he heard such attributed to him, Mr. Whale would have probably died laughing) by creating the Frankenstein franchise in the early '30s and then briefly even bigger for things like Showboat, he has retreated into permanent solitude...and that's exactly where, after a brief stay in the hospital, he returns to -- encountering almost immediately the new gardener hired by his maid Hanna (Lynn Redgrave): a Mr. Clay Boone (Brendan Fraser, in perhaps the best onscreen feat of his career, giving vulnerability the perfect mix of naiveté and boyish heartland compassion). Now, James Whale was gay and, well, Clay Boone was a looker; and Whale being who he was -- and in the hands of someone like McKellen and Condon, he was many things: egotist, madman, gentleman, devil, saint, senile -- their paths were bound to cross. It is such an intersection that is at the heart of Gods and Monsters, but it is the heart itself, a study of tragedy brought on at once both by effervescence of the mind and nostalgia eternal, that makes the movie truly great.

During the nearly two hour running time the dynamic between the three stars is on the eternal shift, and mend. At first, after having tepidly posed for one of Whale's paintings, Clay is outwardly disgusted at the older man's sexuality; but then something brings him back. That something is a nearly voracious void in his heart, a curiosity, for the experience and understanding of human life. (Today, I think, we would call it empathy.) And his employer is a near gold-mine of experience -- the man's recounting of both Hollywood and his days as a soldier keep up throughout their first lunches and teas. Hanna herself is not at all amused by these interactions because, though she cares deeply for Mr. Whale, she knows more about his dealings with young men then he would probably care for. She softens though, in her cantankerous and heavily-accented way. (Lynn Redgrave, as the woman behind the voice, gives a performance of perfectly small-sized delights; in one scene, she's a domestic counterpart to McKellen, in another his doting -- if overbearing -- great aunt.) But then Clay and his boss go to a party thrown by a fellow Golden Age director, and then there is a storm, and a return home. And in those run of scenes there is massive heartbreak, understanding, and destruction all compacted and intermingled -- mangling the heart even as the skill of its execution fascinates the mind.

At the very roots of Bill Condon's movie is the hope against hope that a long life will not fade into the recession of a life lived, and the futility of knowing that in realizing that, it already has. Gods and Monsters is as versatile a work of art as its hero was a human being: as a drawing-room drama, the tiny ensemble is superb in its realization; as a biography, the director is remarkable for breathing life into a curiosity, cloaking his eccentricities in the pathos that begot them; and as a mood piece, it is singularly stupendous -- staggering in the subtle emotional damage it wreaks. Wonderful indeed is the movie that views divinity and monstrosity, empathy and isolation, humanity and the rotting power of loss as two sides of the same coin.