‘Gothic’: An Absence of Enough Excess

In “Gothic” (Cineplex Odeon Showcase), Ken Russell has the kind of subject he does best: poets of excess, half-mad rebel artists whose art soars while their lives rot. But the film--despite some excellent pieces--fails. Strangely, from a director who glories in excess, it may fail because it isn’t excessive enough.

“Gothic” shows us Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Shelley) and two lesser-known figures through a modern glass, darkly. As in most of Russell, we see them less as people than as great mythic cartoons, wickedly undercut: mad marionettes, explosive caricatures spouting histrionics and hysterics.

The movie takes place in Geneva, Switzerland, on June 16, 1816, during the famous “haunted summer” spent by 24-year-old Shelley, Mary and her half-sister, Claire Clairmont, with the self-exiled George Gordon Lord Byron. There, at Byron’s Villa Diodati, the guests--spurred by drink, opium, crisscrossing lusts and the wild lashes of a lakeside thunderstorm--sat up through the night, composing ghost stories. One tale, told by the fifth guest, Dr. John Polidori, became “The Vampyre”--an antecedent of “Dracula”--while another, spun by Mary, became “Frankenstein.”

Screenwriter Stephen Volk shows these two prototypal nightmares, spawned together, oozing up from the evening’s psychological mire. The guests not only create the monsters, they are the monsters. For Volk, Shelley is Dr. Frankenstein, the destiny-dogged man who played God, and Lord Byron is the vampire, a sinister nobleman with a taste for blood and decadence. The two projections are colored by desperate adoration. Mary sees Shelley slipping away from her to his laudanum addiction and Byron; Polidori, in this version, is Byron’s ridiculed ex-lover. As night plunges on, the fears take on flesh, and some weird monster, raging up from the subconscious, bedevils them all. Frankenstein and Dracula have emerged, never again to leave.

All of this is a wonderful notion. But the movie always seems more audacious in externals--gothic trappings of loathsomeness and horror--than at its core. It becomes a gallery of the macabre and nauseating: cobweb-strewn cellars layered with filth and beady slime; snakes curling around suits of armor; bloody sex and stigmata; rats, leeches, ghouls and goats--all sunk in a Thomas Dolby synthesizer stew of dissonant chords and Bernard Herrmann quotations. The movie is so cartoonish that these objects of disgust don’t really become disgusting. Perhaps “Gothic” is the kind of movie which, to work at all, has to be a masterpiece; if not, it’s in danger of making you giggle.

From the start it’s clear that Russell is using modern horror-movie grammar, playfully mixing up pop and classic. But in “Gothic” there isn’t poetry enough to balance the kitsch. This movie would be better if Volk quoted liberally from Byron and Shelley, if we heard scraps of “Ozymandias “ or “Childe Harold,” if the men really functioned as poets. (“Frankenstein” itself is quoted only once, and by Shelley!) It isn’t enough just to parade great writers past us; we need demonstrations of their greatness before we can be amused by seeing it burlesqued.

“Gothic” also needs a slower build on its long day’s journey into night: These bent romantics hop around crazily, besotted with rage and glee, from the first second you see them. You feel that Volk and Russell have missed a magnificent opportunity. Why haven’t they structured the script all the way through as tales within tales, dreams within dreams, a Moebius strip of nightmares, a mix of Bunuel’s later films, “Saragossa Manuscript” and “Nightmare on Elm Street”? Volk explains both too much and too little and, oddly enough, Mary and Polidori never even get to tell their stories--though that’s what the movie is ostensibly about.

As Mary, Natasha Richardson, the daughter of Tony Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave, gives an intensely high-dramatic performance that anchors the film: She’s a steely flower. But Julian Sands’ Shelley becomes slightly ludicrous: a shivering, sweating junkie poet who probably deserves narcolepsy. Gabriel Byrne puts an elegant spin on lines like “Alas, I have no virtues.” His Byron has a lot of dark style, though at times it suggests “The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s” Dr. Frankenfurter redone for “Masterpiece Theatre.”

Miriam Cyr, as Claire, is a fiery beauty, but she’s pushed into such hideous arpeggios of unstoppered frenzy that you can barely judge her. Though Timothy Spall, as Polidori, initially seems well over the top, he probably has the firmest attack: He gives a real eye-popping, Ken Russell-movie performance.

“Gothic” (rated R for nudity, sex and language) offers much more than the average horror film, or even the average literary film: fertile creativity, stunning notions, wild visions, wackily sumptuous decor and photography. But it doesn’t give you true shivery grandeur, archetypal power. Too often, it’s simply a wild and crazy evening with Byron and Claire, Percy and Mary--one where, as in “The Castle of Otranto,” all the spooks are inevitably ersatz, all the skeletons papier-mache. Alas, it has too few real vices.