Mary, as well as the story itself, should be haunted by such losses, especially given that she liked nothing more than hanging out at her mother’s gravesite while scribbling in her notebooks. Instead, the movie, as picturesque as it is, only skims the surface of such complex emotions. Both Fanning and Douglas Booth (“Loving Vincent”) as Percy are exceedingly pretty to behold and wear their period garb well. But they never feel fully settled into their roles or engaged in their scandalous liaison (he was married with child— actually, two—when they met). Not helping matters is that far too much of Booth’s dialogue consists of lines from Percy’s poems, as if he is riffing on his own greatest hits.
Instead, the most fascinating couple in the movie turns out to be Bel Powley (“The Diary of a Teenage Girl”) as Claire Clairmont, Mary’s younger half-sister. The high-spirited, natural-born rebel falls for Tom Sturridge’s self-adoring Byron, a study in rakish foppery, excessive eyeliner, swishy tapestry robes and vulpine-like leering as he lasciviously flicks his tongue at a willing Claire, who is pregnant with his baby. The twist and turns in their toxic tango are far more intriguing than Percy and Mary’s travails.
Another sin: Why hire such TV favorites as Joanne Froggatt (Anna Bates on “Downton Abbey’s”) as Mary’s disagreeable stepmother and Maisie Williams (Arya Stark on “Game of Thrones") as her loyal Scottish chum and never give them anything memorable to do?
Don’t expect anyone to shout, “It’s alive!” as they depart the theater. It’s a shame that this rather dreary and excessively talky account underplays its primary draw: Finding a fresh way to show how the original goth girl modernized the myth of a mad scientist who dares to play God. Not even a jolt of electricity could spark this overlong timeline of events in its subject’s life that are ticked off like items on a to-do list. Mary Shelley and her monster fable deserve better than a treatment that is basically DOA.
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