Mary Shelley (2017)

Mary Shelley arrives dressed in the somber garments of the literary biopic, tracing the youthful years of the woman who invented science fiction before the term existed. Haifaa al-Mansour directs, Elle Fanning carries the title role, and the film concerns itself chiefly with a young woman's claim to her own mind. It is a romance, a period piece, and a study of authorship. The mood is damp, the parlors are cold, and the men are mostly insufferable.

The central drama is one of intellectual property and personal freedom. Mary writes Frankenstein, no publisher will touch it under a lady's name, and her husband's preface becomes the price of admission. The film takes real interest in that indignity, and its feminist sympathies are legible without being shouted. The casting and the direction place a woman's agency at the center of a story that history preferred to tell through the men around her. What the film does not do is extend that attention to race, class in any systemic sense, or the natural world. The bohemian arrangements of the Shelley circle are unconventional and casually libertine, though the film keeps those matters firmly in the register of period scandal.

Elsewhere the ledger is quiet. There is no sermonizing, no body politics, no diagnostic language about the mind, and no attempt to rewrite the nineteenth century into a lecture hall. The film smooths out a genuinely strange life into recognizable prestige drama, which is its own kind of timidity. Historians have complained, critics have shrugged, and the box office barely noticed. A modest, well-mannered picture about a woman who wrote something monstrous, and a film content to let the monster stay off screen where the manners are better.

A restrained vintage, then, with a firm tannin of female authorship and very little else in the glass. It will not trouble anyone's evening, and it will not start an argument at dinner. The sommelier notes it, files it, and moves on to the next bottle.

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