Gods and Monsters

DirecTV had a bunch of free preview weekends during the whole coronavirus lockdown bullshit, and I used one of those weekends to record Gods and Monsters. I thought it was coming up again soon and watched it, but even though it doesn't seem to be on in the next week, it is on DVD, so I don't have to wait to post about it.

Gods and Monsters is based on a book by Christopher Bram, which is a fictionalized hypothetical about what the final months of the life of director James Whale (Ian McKellen) might have been like. Whale is most famous for directing the first two Frankenstein movies, as well as some other very good movies in the 1930s before Universal edited one of his late 1930s movies to shreds, hastening the end of his film directing career.

By 1956, when the film begins, Whale was living in comfortable retirement, until the first of a series of strokes that sapped his mental faculties and ultimately led him to commit suicide by drowning himself in his pool, which he had even though he didn't swim. He had the pool in part because a former lover, David Lewis (David Dukes), had gotten one, As you can surmise, Whale was gay (and this was an open secret in Hollywood); Whale also found the pool useful for pool parties with nubile young men in attendance.

In the movie, Whale lives with his maid Hanna (Lynn Redgrave), who dotes on him even though she as a devout Catholic disapproves of his homosexuality. He's also having very bad flashbacks to his difficult younger life that he can only dull by drugs that he doesn't want to take. Into this comes Clayton Boone (a completely fictitious character created by Bram and played in the movie by Brendan Fraser), a former Marine who lives a meager existence as a gardener and has been hired to tend to Whale's lawn and hedges.

Whale finds that Clayton is good looking and, being gay, decides he wants to keep Clayton around if at all possible. So Whale, having turned to painting and drawing in his retirement, asks Clayton to pose for him. It's good money, although Clayton starts to get a bit unnerved when Whale asks him to take off his shirt.

Clayton, not knowing much about Hollywood, obviously didn't know that Whale is gay, or even who Whale was, and can't convince his friends that he's working for a formerly famous director. Still, Clayton gets drawn more into Whale's orbit, despite being more disturbed when he finds out that his new boss is gay and especially when Whale starts talking more graphically about his past. They didn't use the phrase "too much information" in those days, but sometimes you don't want to hear about other people's sex lives regardless of how conventional it might be.

Now, we know from history that Whale ultimately did commit suicide due to the effects of the strokes, so I'm not really giving anything away. As such, the movie's plot is a bit less important and the movie becomes more of a character study of a dying man who's also losing his sanity, and his friend of sorts who also had a rather difficult life (he only joined the Marines to try to please his father and washed out for health reasons).

With that in mind, Gods and Monsters is a very fine movie, with excellent performances from both McKellen and Fraser. Also putting in a very good performance is Redgrave, who I wouldn't have recognized if I hadn't seen her name in the opening credits. The story at times lets them down, especially in the scene the night before Whale's suicide, but for the most part the story is good too.

If you haven't seen Gods and Monsters before, it's a movie I definitely recommend.