My only misgiving about this blu-ray is
that the film being released under the horror, sci-fi, and B-movie
focused Vestron Collector's Series banner does threaten to perpetuate
one of the biggest problems that Gothic has had over the
years: the misconception that it is a typical horror film, when in
fact it is a beast all its own, and arguably not even horror at all.
Vestron's trailers for the film, theatrically and on VHS, marketed it
as a straight-up horror movie, which set it up to miss its target
audience: many horror fans found it to be very perplexing in a way
they did not expect, and many of those who would have loved it
skipped it because of how drastically the trailers undersell its
thematic complexity and drama. Yes, it is steeped in both visual and
narrative horror elements - steeped in the dread-filled look and feel
of Gothic fiction - but these are used in the service of a
psychological character study; a highly stylized and occasionally
surreal emotional portrait of four great artists whose work
exemplified both the frightening and the romantic, and helped shape
horror storytelling as we know it. It isn't horror so much as it is
about horror, and the
personal and psychological experiences that lead these literary
figures to create it. It is through this lens that Gothic
is best viewed, as something that honestly would be more at home in
The Criterion Collection than the Vestron Collection (though I again
must emphasize that my concern is one of audience expectation;
Vestron/Lionsgate has done a marvelous job with this
beautifully-restored and feature-packed special edition).
The four artists captured in Russell's
psychotropic portrait are Mary Shelley (Natasha Richardson), Percy
Shelley (Julian Sands), Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne), and Dr. John
Polidori (Timothy Spall), and the film is an imagined version of what
might have transpired during a real weekend that the four of them
spent - along with Mary's step-sister and Byron's sometimes-lover
Claire (Miriam Cyr) - at Byron's villa, taking laudanum and telling
each other ghost stories. This weekend is famous in literary history
as the weekend which inspired both Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein
and John Polidori to write The Vampyre, and Russell interprets
this critical literary crossroads as a drug-fueled descent into their
psyches as they push each other to seek out their deepest, darkest
fears, and to conjure their fears into being for them to confront.
After the four hold a seance as a sort of story-conjuring ritual, the
film has their fears literally manifest as a malignant spirit which
has been conjured to haunt them; but this is what we see through the
eyes of five opiate-fueled unreliable narrators, so we are left to
question if we are witnessing their bad trips and their shared
hysteria as their internal states overtake their senses, or if it is
real after all, and they truly did conjure up something worthy of
their stories and poetry. It is a fascinating narrative device for
Russell to play with, but thematically it may not matter whether the
apparitions are real or imagined: what is real are the inner demons
and deep fears which they conjure up, and it is these inner demons
which they must conquer in order to channel them into some of
literature's most influential works.
The film begins in a somewhat
straightforward fashion, as a period drama about these five literary
friends getting together for a weekend of philosophy, poetry, and
debauchery. But even then, it is a thoroughly Ken Russell vision of
this type of story: a heady, passionate whirlwind of chaotic
personalities, as their minds and passions race, and their
freewheeling behavior races with it. While we often think of the
Romantic poets with reverence, we see them here as they probably
really were: brash, egocentric, hard-partying enfants terribles who
love lovemaking and laudanum as much as they love intellectualism and
the written word. They are the rock stars of their day, and Russell
plays them as such, with spot-on performances from the whole
ensemble. Full of swagger and charisma that masks his
often-reprehensible behavior, Gabriel Byrne's Lord Byron is a wild
and insatiable early-1800s Jim Morrison or Mick Jagger. Julian Sands'
Percy Shelley, meanwhile, is just as mercurial and overindulgent, but
with the wide-eyed otherworldly romanticism of a David Bowie. Miriam
Cyr's Clair is like the groupie to these rock stars, trying to keep
up with their wildness, but out of her depth. Timothy Spall's
Polidori, meanwhile, represents the culture-shock of the values of
that day being thrown into Byron's libertine world: a self-loathing
puritan guiltily harboring feelings of lust and homosexuality that
clash with his religion (Byron and Shelley are both played as
bisexual, but they were able to see through the homophobic morals of
the era in a way that Polidori was not). It is Mary Shelley, played
with quiet intensity by the late, great Natasha Richardson in her
first feature film role, who is the coolest head and most centered
mind of the bunch, whose brilliance hasn't yet been overtaken by the
hedonism of the rock-star lifestyle that she now lives, even as she
feels just as deeply as the rest of them, if not more so.
Watching this group
is fascinating, and one feels in no hurry for the horror-ish material
to even begin: they are deeply compelling personalities played
excellently (with the ever dark and charismatic Byrne predictably
stealing much of the show), and the film at once bursts the bubble of
the myth of the Romantic poet while also adding depth to our
perception of them. They speak to each other in self-consciously
intellectual bursts of poetry as if to one-up each other in
eloquence, in a way that would seem laughably over-the-top if many of
these lines weren't pulled straight from the actual journals and
letters of the real people by screenwriter Stephen Volk (Percy
Shelley: “It is an age of dreams and nightmares!” Byron: “Yes,
and we are merely the children of that age.”). It is all, in
classic Ken Russell fashion, almost too over-the-top, but just
restrained enough to remain plausible. Likewise, the visuals have
little bursts of surrealism that could only come from Russell,
jolting you out of the rhythm of a period drama with their
strangeness. And all of this is just when the five are still
relatively sober, and the film is in its comparatively more
restrained first half.
When
Russell starts to journey deeper into their heads, and as their minds
become more and more affected by the dual influences of opiates and
deep-running psychological terror, things only get stranger and
stranger as the runtime goes on. The horrors that they conjure up
from their psyches are a mix of classic Gothic horror imagery, drawn
both from the genre's literary and cinematic roots, and purely
Russell hallucinations of often psychosexual surrealism. They build
slowly – in keeping with the concept of our characters getting
gradually more afraid and intoxicated as the night goes on – until
finally reaching a fever-pitch of frantic, unhinged madness. The crux
of his horror sequences, however, are not special effects, but
lighting and cinematography. The whole film is beautifully shot,
mostly on location in an authentic manor house of the same period as
Byron's villa, but in the last act the shot compositions become
particularly otherworldly. Shots in this part of the film recall his
collaborations with Derek Jarman, his production designer on The
Devils, and prove beyond a
shadow of a doubt that despite being restrained by a smaller budget,
Russell's visual power and elegance had not been at all diminished
with age.Score:
The picture:
It is
this visual elegance which had, unfortunately, suffered more than any
other aspect of Gothic
over the years thanks to the film's awful home video distribution.
Vestron's VHS release of the film was in keeping with the standards
of its day, but the one and only official DVD release which followed
(from the famously shoddy Artisan Films) was a straight-up port of
that VHS/laserdisc transfer, in a time when it was already severely
out of date. The biggest problem with this transfer is that it was
open-matte 4x3, meaning that it took the careful widescreen masking
off of Russell's images to create a picture that revealed too much,
and looked far too loose in its framing thanks to all the extra area
at the top and bottom of the picture. For a filmmaker whose shots are
as precisely, artfully framed as Russell's, open-matte is just as
destructive to his shot compositions as pan-n-scan, and unless the
viewer zoomed in on the picture on a widescreen TV to artificially
create the 16x9 matting themselves, this presentation made Gothic
look significantly less well-shot than it is. The film was only ever
made available in its intended aspect ratio in Europe, where MGM held
the rights, and released a widesceen DVD; indifference to the film in
America caused Vestron's VHS/laser master to be the one and only
accessible version – until now.
Seeing
Gothic beautifully
restored on Vestron's blu-ray, in its proper aspect ratio on this
continent for the first time, is a revelation: the film looks every
bit as lush, haunting, and darkly gorgeous as I had imagined it
would. What a difference it makes when the people doing a home media
release actually care about doing justice to the look of the film:
from the carefully-restored widescreen framing to the opulent color
to the overall excellent clarity and detail of the transfer, this is
a whole different viewing experience from the lazy, slapdash Artisan
disc we are used to. It's a cliché to say that it's like seeing the
film for the first time, but in the case of Gothic it
almost is. On the strength of the transfer alone (actually, even on
the strength of the aspect ratio alone), this disc should be an
immediate, unquestionable double-dip for those with the old DVD.
Score:
The Sound:
This blu-ray presents Gothic in its original 2.0 mono soundtrack, which has its inherent limitations, but is very well restored. Dialogue is clear, clean, and comes through much better than on the DVD, and the sound effects are wonderfully atmospheric. Thomas Dolby's excellent score also comes through strongly. Mono limitations aside, this is a well-mixed film, and the sound design builds the Gothic horror atmosphere quite effectively indeed. As presented on this blu-ray, it sounds as good as it possibly can in its authentic theatrical form.
Score:
The Extras:
In addition to the gorgeous remaster, the special features present on this release are its other biggest selling-point, as they present a great, very thorough cross-section of the film's production. There
are brand-new interviews, approximately 20 minutes each, with actor
Julian Sands, writer Stephen Volk, and director of photography Mike
Southon, and the three add up to a pretty solid and thorough one-hour
documentary about the artistic journey of making the film, and
especially about the process of collaborating with Russell. The
interviews are very substantive, dealing heavily with two deep
topics: how, from these three very different areas of production,
they worked to pull off the difficult genre blend of a horror-ish
story that is also a highly literary dive into the minds and thoughts
of real artists, and how they all experienced Russell's artistic
process. It's great to hear such intelligent people get literary and
philosophical about the first topic, but it's also fascinating to
hear their thoughts on the second topic: their insights into working
with Russell give a strong understanding of what a brilliant and
visionary (if mercurial) artist he was. The late filmmaker's
reputation as a chaotic enfant terrible precedes him, and all three
men indicate that at times he could be hard to work with, but they
all paint a picture of that difficulty being more than outweighed by
his brilliant artistic process, and the ways in which he (contrary to
his image) cultivated collaboration and put great trust in the
artists around him. Clearly working with Russell was a very formative
and positive experience for all three of them, and the
behind-the-scenes stories they tell further expand my respect for the
filmmaker. The absence of the late Natasha Richardson is of course
deeply felt: I would love to hear her thoughts on Gothic,
both because it was her first feature film, and because it was
something of a family reunion with Russell, since her mother, Vanessa
Redgrave, had collaborated with him on one of the most iconic films
of both of their careers, The Devils.
Alas, Lionsgate's apathy towards the film ended too late for that.
Gabriel Byrne, Timothy Spall, and Miriam Cyr's absence from the
extras is also unfortunate, but the interviews that are here are
excellent, so that can be forgiven. Furthering the behind-the-scenes
insights on the disc are two commentaries: one with Russell's widow,
Lisi Russell, and one with composer Thomas Dolby, accompanied by an
isolated track of his excellent score for the film.Score:
Overall,
this is a top-notch special edition for a film that was long overdue
for this sort of treatment. There are more extras that fans could
have wished for (primarily interviews with the other three living
stars of the film), but the extras that are here are both plentiful
and substantial, and given that Lionsgate neglected this film so
badly for so long, I'm just thrilled that they produced such strong
extras for it in the first place. The whole Vestron Video
Collector's Series is an awesome move by Lionsgate, reversing with a
vengeance their long-running habit of neglecting their more
off-the-beaten-path and culty catalog titles, and Gothic
may be the most impressive entry in the series yet. At the very
least, it is certainly the film in the collection that was most
overdue for a special edition treatment. This really is a
Criterion-Collection-quality movie, but since Lionsgate has a firm
policy of not licensing to other distributors, I'm very glad that
they rose to the occasion instead, and made this release as good as
it deserved to be. The transfer is beautiful, and finally presents
Gothic as it should be
seen, for the first time since theaters. Hopefully this will at last
lead to a long-overdue reevaluation of the film, not as some odd cult
horror movie, but as a late-career masterpiece by a one-of-a-kind
cinematic auteur.
Overall score:
- Christopher S.
Jordan
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