Film Journal July 2018

The Force is with Disney. Four movies into
their re-launched Star Wars franchise, and they
haven’t turned in a stinker yet. OK, so you can
attribute that more to the overarching vision
of producer Kathleen Kennedy than (to quote
Han Solo) to hokey religions and ancient
weapons—but the fact remains that, with Ron
Howard’s Solo, this new incarnation of the
franchise from a galaxy far, far away continues
to move along quite nicely.
Newcomer Alden Ehrenreich, who gave
a standout turn in the Coen Brothers’ Hail,
Caesar!, is tasked here with a heavy burden:
playing a younger version of one of the most
iconic characters in film history. This is no
Bond or Batman. Harrison Ford is Han Solo.
Except now, he’s not—and Ehrenreich does
an admirable job of threading the needle, portraying
the brash overconfidence and hidden
softness of Star Wars’ smuggler with a heart
of gold without tipping over into outright
impersonation.
Solo’s script, by the father-son duo of
Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan (the elder
Kasdan co-wrote earlier Star Wars installments
The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the
Jedi and The Force Awakens), takes us back to
Han Solo’s early days. Here, he’s a low-level
criminal with dreams of escaping his home
world of Corellia and becoming a pilot. His
quest takes him first into the dreaded Imperial
Army, where he serves as footsoldier, and
then under the wing of cynical smuggler Beckett
(Woody Harrelson), who himself works
for the crime lord Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany).
It’s only when the silky, sinister Vos comes
into play that we get to the meat of Solo’s
story, which involves the theft of an extremely
valuable haul of fuel. Yup: It’s a heist movie.
The fact that Solo takes so long to get to the
heist, and that it trundles through three or
four endings once the heist is completed, is
its biggest flaw. Like many blockbusters these
days, Solo could stand to trim 20 minutes off
its running time.
But, hey: At least we’re looking at an overlong
good movie, and not an overlong bad one.
Though Solo doesn’t break the mold, it’s a consistently
entertaining galactic crime caper that
benefits in particular from well-constructed
action scenes and (as always) top-notch production
and costume design.
Donald Glover and Phoebe Waller-Bridge
are cast standouts as Lando Calrissian (originally
played by Billy Dee Williams) and new
character L3-37, respectively. The latter is a
droid obsessed with liberating her kind from
the shackles of their “organic overlords”—a
funny aside, and one that widens the scope of
the Star Wars universe in a way that Solo could
have used more of. With its familiar characters
and occasionally too-convenient connections
to earlier films, Solo doesn’t broaden the Star
Wars experience the way, say, Rogue One (with
its emphasis on the working stiffs of the Rebellion)
or The Force Awakens (with its rethinking
of Jedi mythology) did. As a part of the larger
whole, it doesn’t feel particularly fresh. But,
hey—Disney’s putting out a new Star Wars
movie every year. Not every one can herald a
change of direction for the franchise. Solo has
an engaging story and interesting characters.
This time around, that’s enough.
—Rebecca Pahle
MARY SHELLEY
IFC FILMS/Color/1.85/Dolby Digital/121 Mins./
Rated PG-13
Cast: Elle Fanning, Douglas Booth, Bel Powley, Joanne
Froggatt, Tom Sturridge, Maisie Williams, Stephen
Dillane, Ben Hardy.
Directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour.
Screenplay: Emma Jensen.
Produced by Amy Baer, Alan Moloney, Ruth Coady.
Executive producers: Mark Amin, Tyler Boehm, Joannie
Burstein, Johanna Hogan, Phil Hunt, Emma Jensen, Rebecca
Miller, Compton Ross, Gabrielle Stewart, Peter
Watson, Cami Winikoff.
Director of photography: David Ungaro.
Production designer: Paki Smith.
Editor: Alex Mackie.
Music: Amelia Warner.
Costume designer: Caroline Koener.
A HanWay Films and BFI presentation of a Parallel Films
production.
The lady author of Frankenstein comes into
her own.
A period piece for the #MeToo movement,
Haifaa Al-Mansour’s (Wajda) Mary Shelley is
a glossy, righteous look at the early years of
the 19th-century author of Frankenstein. Well
structured, well directed and starring a very
good Elle Fanning, the film nonetheless suffers
from that tendency to use characters more
as vehicles for ideas than for exploring human
character.
When we first meet Mary Wollstonecraft
Godwin (Fanning), she is a dreamy teenager
of 16 taken to scribbling ghost stories in the
local cemetery. She is in perpetual conflict
with her stepmother (Joanne Froggatt, in a
small, nasty role at entertaining odds with
her good-girl portrayal of Anna on “Downton
Abbey”). When Mary’s father, the writer
William Godwin (Stephen Dillane, otherwise
known to “Game of Thrones” fans as Stannis
Baratheon), sends her to Scotland in an
effort to temporarily subdue the domestic
turbulence, Mary enjoys a fateful encounter:
She meets the handsome poet Percy Shelley
(Douglas Booth). Soon Mary must return to
London, but her new love interest, equally
smitten, follows quickly on her heels. Shelley
begins to study under the literary tutelage of
Mary’s father, who is in desperate need of the
money Shelley can offer for the privilege.
Stirred by romantic, progressive ideals
concerning free love, Mary and Shelley—who
is married and the father of a little girl—run
away together. They’re joined by Mary’s
half-sister, Claire (The Diary of a Teenage Girl’s
Bel Powley), who will not be left behind. The
three bohemians set up house in a narrow,
dingy flat, but their joy is short-lived. Shelley’s
wealthy father cuts him off as punishment for
the scandal, Mary and Shelley suffer a personal
tragedy (though it’s Mary who feels it the
more keenly), and Mary must come to terms
with the consequences of Shelley’s callous insistence
on adhering to their “Love whomever
you please” philosophy.
It isn’t until the end of the film that we
finally arrive at that moment for which we
have all been waiting: the trip to the house of
the gleefully misogynistic Lord Byron (Tom
Sturridge) that results in the challenge, among
the bored party of literati, to see who can
write the most chilling ghost story. As the film
makes very—even insistently—clear, Mary
draws on all the tragedy that has surrounded
her, from the death of her feminist mother
shortly after her birth, to the abandonment of
pregnant Claire by the libertine Byron, to her
own disillusionment with Shelley, and creates
her masterpiece: Frankenstein, or the Modern
Prometheus.
We haven’t quite finished yet, however, as
one old, white male publisher after another
rejects the manuscript, on the grounds that
the material is not suitable for a young lady
author, and, as such, would not appeal to
their readership. Only after Shelley agrees to
write the foreword to the book, which is then
published anonymously—leading to the popular
misconception that he is its author—is
Frankenstein made available to the public. Mary
is indignant, but at the end of Mary Shelley, everything
works out in love and literature alike.
Mary Shelley was filmed from a spec
script authored by first-time feature writer
Emma Jensen (with additional writing by the
director). It covers a lot of ground over its
121 minutes, but it is a testament to both
writers that the story never drags, rather
continuing to move forward at a nice clip with
brief, punchy scenes. Al-Mansour goes all-in
when Mary finally gets to writing Frankenstein,
pushing the camera tight on Fanning’s face as
Byron suggests they write their ghost stories,
and depicting the writing process itself with
animated sequences of black ink falling upon,
and staining in spidery tendrils, pages covered
in writing as Mary quotes lines from her book
in voiceover. Otherwise, Al-Mansour’s direction
is relatively unobtrusive and fleet. The
costumes are also as lovely as one could hope
of a film set in the 19th century.
In all, Mary Shelley is sleek and 2018
inoffensive—and something of a missed opportunity.
Mary is feisty, she is intelligent, she
is talented…and it seems as if she is almost
always in the right. Even when she runs away
with Shelley, she acts only in the name of love,
and although she suffers a good deal of heartache
because of it, the film never suggests
her life might have been happier if she had
stayed the socially acceptable course. More
importantly, Mary herself declares at the end:
“I regret nothing.” A rousing sentiment this is,
but a hero who wrestles with herself, and who
therefore makes us feel for her, in addition to
simply admiring her, Mary is not. We may pity
her for the tragedies she suffers, but when
the time calls for it, she rallies beautifully. Her
JULY 2018 / FILMJOURNAL.COM 117
112-127.indd 117
5/23/18 5:04 PM