No one will ever, ever accuse The Bride! of being plodding or conventional. It is really, really looney-tunes in a headache-inducing way. Manic this and that, turned up to eleven or even twelve.
Thematically it exudes sputtering feminist rage and an all-around, never-say-die contempt for…well, dudes, obviously, but also the sensibilities of Joe and Jane Popcorn. It all but vomits in their laps.
It’s wildly “creative”, you bet, but it also struck me as Maggie Gyllenhaal’s professional suicide note.
Friendo: “Stop it! Maggie Gyllenhaal will be fine! Mark my words: She’ll make another film every bit as good as The Lost Daughter.”
HE to Friendo: “Okay. She just had to get the spitting, shrieking rage out of her system, you’re saying.
“But Jessie Buckley’s licking, cat-shrieking, super-wackazoid performance is all on the surface. Superficially grotesque. Will you please tell me what she was so enraged about in that opening nightclub scene? She was just growling, howling and hissing…it all boils down to showboating.
“We all know Martin Landau’s famous observation that when called upon to play a character with a drinking problem, only bad actors pretend to be sloppy drunk. Real alcoholics do everything in their power to conceal the fact that they’re bombed.
“Buckley is delivering a howling, brute-male-hating feminist fury, but she’s so unplugged and such an exhibitionist in this instance, she’s like Landau’s bad actor playing a lush.
“Thank God for the logical, plain-spoken normality of Annette Bening; ditto Peter Sarsgaard’s grubby, unshaven detective.”