"To a new world of Gods and monsters," toasts Dr. Septimus Pretorius, raising a glass to Henry Frankenstein, whom he has just talked into collaborating on the ultimately doomed scheme of creating a mate for his monster. It is this scene from Bride of Frankenstein, the best-known film of James Whale, which provides the title for a new film about that British director. Whale got his start designing sets and directing plays in post-WWI England, where an early success blew him across the Atlantic and into the Hollywood studio system just as the sound era began. Given a contract at Universal Pictures, Whale became a favorite of Carl Laemle, Jr., the son of the studio founder, and consequently was given free reign over the films he made there from the early to mid Thirties. Though Whale is remembered mostly for his stylish horror films, which indeed set the standard for the entire genre -- Frankenstein (1931), Bride (1935), The Old Dark House (1932), and The Invisible Man (1933), the monster flicks represented the director's attempt to break out of what had been until then a rut of war movies. Whale directed the 1936 version Show Boat, but his plans to break out of his monster movie rut came to naught when a spate of box office fizzles coincided with financial troubles at Universal. Unable to get his career going again, he retired from moviemaking, and years later was found dead in Hollywood melodramatic style, floating in his own swimming pool.

The director of Gods and Monsters, Bill Condon, has said he didn't want to make a simple biopic of Whale's life, and instead relied on the novel Father of Frankenstein, by Christopher Bram. Rather than depicting precise details of the director's life, both that book and the film version set Whale's last days in the context of a relationship with one invented character, finding him haunted by another invented character from his distant past.

Of course, "Jimmy" Whale did have a housekeeper named Hannah, though the one in the film is right out of Whale's own films, an over-the-top screamer with a Transylvania accent. In this and many other touches, Condon has succeeded in bringing to bear Whale's own style, macabre wit and sense of campiness. Which is not, however, to say this film does for Frankenstein what Ed Wood did for Dracula. Not exactly. In fact, Whale seems at first an unlikely sort to be remembered as a maker of monster movies. His relationship to his films is depicted here as that same sort of love-hate acknowledgement certain of the persons responsible for Star Trek have exhibited toward that show's more exuberant fans. Though no doubt much of the audience for Gods and Monsters will come to the theater wanting just what an gushing interviewer in the film wants: the same thing they get from the great old horror films. As it turns out, they'll actually find that here, but meanwhile there's more to Whale's story than famous monsters.

Jimmy Whale was one of Hollywood's first openly gay directors, and he is played here by one of the screen's first openly gay actors, Ian McKellen. The performance is astonishing in both depth and nuance: the role involves an aging and very proper Englishman, facing death and his own past with dignity and charm. As his body fails him in the wake of a stroke, Whale looks forward only to suffering and decline, backward to other sorts of pain. In Whale's memories, dreams and reminiscences, we get glimpses of his life, sometimes in a literal flash of lightning that seems to punctuate the story of Frankenstein's storyteller. Grandson of a bishop, son of an overbearing schoolmaster, Whale is drawn to art but sent to war, where he first encounters the pockmarked landscapes and mulilated bodies that haunt his later films. "The only monsters are here," the aged director tells a young friend, pointing to his own head, and referring to his memories of a lover who died in the trenches so long ago.

The young friend is Clayton Boone (Brendan Fraser), a good-looking gardener the older man watches through his window. Whale invites his new yard man to use his swimming pool when he's done working. "We're very informal here. No need to worry about a bathing suit." Boone is both god and monster: a barechested Adonis, but also a deliberate parallel to Frankenstein's creation, from his flat-top haircut to his familiar black boots. The relationship which develops between the working-class yard man and the director (who has obliterated his own working-class roots with a gentlemanly finish) must inevitably be described as "complicated." Whale talks Boone into posing for some sketches, and through this experience, the two get to know one another, and we see that loneliness and the pain of rejection cross the lines of sexual orientation, and are the true "universal horrors." Somebody will make the case that Boone is motivated by his own subconscious homosexual desires, but it didn't appear to me that this was the case the director was making. Boone seems fairly secure in his heterosexuality -- though when Whale's reminiscing goes into too much detail (and the flashbacks give us the image of a swimming pool full of frolicking naked young men) -- Boone becomes angry and violent, and has to go out and reaffirm his own manhood by a brief and perfunctory sexual encounter with a woman.

And yet Boone keeps coming back to Whale, to hear more stories, to tell a few of his own, and develop a genuine friendship. This tentative and awkward relationship forms the structure for the entire film, and is itself a variation on a scene from Bride of Frankenstein, perhaps the most beloved moment in the history of classic horror pictures (the same scene parodied so wickedly in Mel Brooks' send-up of the genre, Young Frankenstein). Here, the Frankenstein monster -- who wants only to be loved -- has been chased by angry villagers into the forest, where he stumbles upon a cottage. From the cottage come the soothing sounds of "Ave Maria" being played on a violin. The violinist turns out to be a blind hermit, who -- since he cannot be repelled by the creature's horrifying appearance, takes him in and offers him food and warmth by his fire, thanking God for sending him someone to talk to. Indeed, this moving scene is made more powerful as the creature, moved to tears, is drawn into his first use of language in response to the hermit's gentle promptings. "I was all alone," says the hermit. "It is BAD to be alone," says blind man. "Alone... BAD," repeats the creature. "Friend... GOOD."

This encounter shadows the whole of Gods and Monsters and shows up directly in actual clips from Bride and allusions in the action. In one somewhat twisted example of the latter, Whale and Boone sit at opposite sides of a table conversing about sexual preferences while sucking on cigars (and, in this case, to reverse Freud, sometimes a cigar is definitely not just a cigar).

And while the use of clips from Whale films is a natural and most welcome addition to this movie, even moreso are the stunning reconstructions of the locations and action for scenes depicting Whale's memories of and dreams about shooting those films. Indeed, the rebuilt Frankenstein laboratory works much better than the actual sets when they were reused in Young Frankenstein. Part of the reason has to do with the perfect simulation of the original actors involved: actors playing Colin Clive playing Henry Frankenstein, along with Ernest Thesiger as Dr. Pretorius, and Elsa Lanchester as the Bride, are delightful dead ringers for the originals. (And the gay subtext we've always been told about is not so "sub" in this "backstage" view!) The other reason these scenes works so well is the subtleness of the direction: instead of coming off like a flashy gimmick, as they easily could have, the mood is so casual as to flow smoothly into the rest of the story. Likewise, when the flashbacks move forward to a Hollywood garden party set at the gleaming twilight of the studio era, we see an equally perfect mimic of an aging Lanchester and Boris Karloff, reunited with their director after a quarter century.

The reconstituted sets and actors are photographed with the same spirit and wit as the originals, and show up not just in flashbacks, but also in the black and white nightmares of James Whale. The director's B-movie dreams feature himself as the monster on the slab, skull hinged open for a brain transplant by the doctor, who is played in this version by Clayton Boone.

Given the theme of "gods and monsters," both the material and the point of view of the director would seem to lend itself to a melodramatic attack on the church or religion, and an effort to make a Frankenstein-like martyr of the main character of the story. But Condon restrains himself from overplaying the "angry ignorant villager" theme or that of an unwanted creation railing at his uncaring Creator. The housekeeper Hannah, the obvious candidate for the "ignorant Fundamentalist" stereotype, is shown to be a Catholic who has been told by her priest that Whale's sin is the worst one can commit -- yet the plain fact is she clings to her employer with a deep and protective love. And while Dr. Pratorius was openly contemptuous of religion, and Whale makes a few coy disparaging comments, religion is treated as fairly as the director treated it in his scene with the religious hermit.

Nor are gay relationships idealized and Whale's sneakingly predatory attempts at seducing Boone soft-pedaled. Finally, the filmmaker allows Clayton to retain his heterosexuality without succumbing to Whale's advances. There is a moment when it seems like we're headed to the opposite end, when Boone (out of a misguided compassion?) volunteers to pose nude for Whale to sketch (and this seems to be a requirement of recent films, the steamy "nude sketch scene"). But this move ends rather badly, with Whale trying to seduce Boone in a nasty way and receiving the expected nasty response -- something that is explained away as being Whale's attempt to provoke Boone to end his life. Boone realizes this and refuses, saying, "I am not your monster." It is the next morning that Whale's body is found floating in his swimming pool, after he has taken the matter into his own hands.

One of the extraordinary experiences of Gods and Monsters is watching different people in different places watching Bride of Frankenstein -- from their own different perspectives. Whale, the director, views the film through the veil of bittersweet reminiscences. Hannah, the Whalean housekeeper, who seems to have one of those monster movie screams ready at the back of her throat, watches the monster with horror, and cheers when he is killed. A woman tending the bar where Boone himself first watches the movie dismisses it as "corny". Boone's own response to the film is harder to figure out -- perhaps like that of many of us, it involves a sense of fascination and wonder for a story that touches us in ways we don't completely understand. At the end of Gods and Monsters, years have gone by, and Boone watches the film again, with his own little boy sprawled across their living room floor. With pride, he tells his son he knew the director of a movie the boy admits is "better than most monster movies." Boone takes the boy off to bed and kisses his wife, who reminds him to take out the garbage. And here is the most powerful scene in the film, one which is not in the novel: alone in the night, beneath a sudden rainstorm, Boone drops his trash in the can, then stumbles down the alley in Frankenstein's monster style.

The cleansing image of falling rain, the childlike play of one outcast who found a home mimicking one who did not, combine to lift the climax above any "pro-gay" or "anti-religion" messages a director with a heavier hand might have tried to leave viewers. Instead, one is left only with a feeling of immense gratitude and the simplest and most universal of messages: Friend... Good.