Haifaa al-Mansour's story of how Mary Shelley came to write Frankenstein is like two hours of Laugh In's Joke Wall - a highlight reel from the Shelleys' lives punctuated by door - with Clara, Mary's sister, most often the one to throw open the door to come in and Mary's husband, Percy, most often the one to grab his coat and hat and head out, slamming the door behind him, and when the door is next thrown open, there's no telling which of the extreme ends of the human emotional spectrum these characters will be on - will they have lurched forward in time to the next most dramatic episode of the Shelleys' lives or will they still be responding to the last? - making the movie feel like a 19th Century Clueless - petulant, door, immature, door, self-pitying, door, sassy, door, morose, door - but right at the end, in reply to a publisher's question about her age, Elle Fanning's Mary Shelley, at last an author, answers, "Eighteen," and suddenly the glib nature of it all, the sore lack of monstrous creation, makes some small sense.
★★☆☆☆
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