When I met famous writer Mary Wollstonecraft that great poet Percy Shelley was brave and wonderful. So begins a glamorous Bohemian love story marked by both passion and personal tragedy that will feed her Gothic artwork.
It's undercut by the hazy, magical realist aesthetic, the general insufferable nature of the men and the fact that a work that strives to be a serious, feminist piece too often feels like gothic romantic fiction.
The director and her star make their point under the meticulously appointed cover of the film's 18th-century setting, but they make it plainly, cleanly, and with fire.
Mary Shelley isn't a perfect movie...But the movie performs an important task: It gets people eager to learn more about Shelley, one of the most fascinating women in English history.
Well-mannered, largely accurate to the facts and pretty to look at, it fails to convey what it must have been like to be an artist so out of step with her time.
Mary Shelley wants to be a film about artistic creation and female liberation. And, to a degree, it is. But it's so flat and poorly paced that it just feels like a squandered opportunity of monstrous proportions.
