REVIEW: Mary Shelley biopic sleepwalks right past a fascinating young woman who deserved better

REVIEW: Mary Shelley — a blousy, drowsy biopic — leaves this fascinating young woman high and dry in our imaginations as little more than a pouty doom magnet. Miss Shelley deserved much better.

MARY SHELLEY (PG)

Rating: Two stars (2 out of 5)

Director: Haifaa Al-Mansour (Wadjda)

Starring: Elle Fanning, Douglas Booth, Bel Powley, Tom Sturridge, Stephen Dillane.

Monstered, but not by her own creation

“I was brought into this world to be abandoned,” states Mary Shelley at one of many ponderously inane junctures in the movie which bears her name.

And wouldn’t you just know it? This blousy, drowsy biopic sleepwalks right past this fascinating young woman, leaving her high and dry in our imaginations as little more than a pouty doom magnet.

Having packed quite a lot of living, loving and literary brilliance into her short prime, Miss Shelley (played blankly by a miscast Elle Fanning) deserved much better than the drab treatment meted out to her here.

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Douglas Booth and Elle Fanning in Mary Shelley.

For crying out loud, the is someone who cranked out one of the most sophisticated, influential and enduring novels of the 19th century in Frankenstein.

She started work on this masterpiece as a teenager! During a tempestuous affair with rock-star poet of the early 1800s, Percy Shelley!

Yet all of this (and so much more, including the tragic lack of recognition that came Mary’s way) is reduced to a dour collection of dim lowlights from a vivid life story.

Elle Fanning as Mary Shelley.

Elle Fanning as Mary Shelley.

To see the brilliant Mary relegated to the status of innocent and inexpressive bystander in her own movie is inexcusable, particularly when there have been so many comprehensive biographies published over the years.

Oddly, as static as the production turns out to be — with a two-hour running time only compounding the inertia — a majority of the performances outside of Fanning’s ineffective display are quite lively in their own right.

Douglas Booth strikes the right notes of intellect and insensitivity as the great Percy Bysshe Shelley (who might be due for a better biopic than this himself), as does Tom Sturridge as the permanently hungover Lord Byron.

Bel Powley (Diary of a Teenage Girl) also makes off with a handful of scenes all her own as Mary’s duplicitous stepsister (and part-time lover of Byron) Claire Clairmont.