'Mary Shelley' Is Less Than The Sum Of Its Parts
Elle Fanning stars in this uneven, "perfumed account" of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin's romance with poet Percy Shelley, and the fateful weekend that birthed her novel Frankenstein.
Nearly all moviegoers know the plot of Frankenstein; or, The Modern, which Mary Shelley precociously wrote at 18. Many of them are also familiar with the novel's backstory, dramatized in such films as and : Mary was challenged to write a ghost story in competition with no less than Lord Byron and her future husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley.
