The Libertine

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! There May Be SPOILERS in the movie reviews !

November 25, 2005

"I do not want you to like me," says Johnny Depp at the top of "The Libertine," his eyes glowering in firelight like the devil incarnate. He couldn't have roused the audience more if he had challenged us to a duel, since it is the instinct of an actor to seek out the humanity in his character, however base or wrong-headed he may be.

Like its rakish title character, English poet and hedonist John Wilmot, "The Libertine" labors to alienate. Set during the Restoration era of 1670s London, it abhors the pretty and actively discourages the oohs and aahs of conventional costume pageantry. The entire film is cast in mist, muddy greens and flickering candles that prompt us to squint and lean forward. If Wilmot fancies himself the anti-Christ of his moment, then "The Libertine" is the anti-"Masterpiece Theatre" of ours.

I'm pleased to report that neither Depp nor the movie, a potent directing debut for Laurence Dunmore, succeeds in achieving their distancing goals altogether. "The Libertine" is a seductively entertaining, fangs-bared historical comedy of a sort the English used to do in the days that Peter Greenaway dreamed up "The Draughtsman's Contract" and Christopher Hampton put some British bite into "Les Liaisons Dangereuses."

Adapted by Stephen Jeffreys from his pithy Royal Court play, "The Libertine" splits its attentions between the off-again, on-again alliance of Wilmot (aka the Earl of Rochester) and his enlightened benefactor King Charles II (a refreshingly restrained John Malkovich), and Wilmot's debilitating attachment to stage actress Elizabeth Barry (Samantha Morton).

At the film's outset, Charles has absolved the loose-lipped Earl of past transgressions so that he may abet him in his political battles. Rebelliously incapable of catering to the whims of the king and the needs of his wife, Elizabeth (Rosamund Pike), Wilmot redirects his energies toward the willful Barry, who initially bridles at his Svengali-like overtures to transform her rickety acting career.

Wilmot and Barry's exquisitely shaped first encounter backstage is performed with spitfire passion by Depp and Morton, who sniff and snap at each other like caged tigers. Even when "The Libertine" turns its gaze from these two seething lovers, Jeffreys' tartly literate script reflects his protagonist's ardor for lingual precision and butt-naked truth.

By Claudia Puig, USA TODAY Fri Nov 25, 7:16 AM ET

If your idea of a good time is watching a disjointed period piece featuring a scrawny dog defecating, dozens of dissipated people fornicating and a syphilitic Johnny Depp with oozing pustules on his face, The Libertine may be just the movie for you.

And if those elements don't dissuade you, there are grainy visuals and dizzying handheld camera work. Perhaps director Laurence Dunmore intended to make a Restoration-era piece in a contemporary style, with gritty digital camera work. Or maybe he simply had a very low budget.

The off-putting flaws are a shame because Depp puts in a strong performance as the debauched John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, a 17th-century reprobate and poet who spent his short life carousing and posthumously earned acclaim for his literary work.

Samantha Morton, as the object of his affections (and presumably not his affliction), does as good a job as she can, given the limitations of her enigmatic character.

The best thing about the movie is Michael Nyman's evocative score, which strikes the emotional chords the rest can't convey.

John Malkovich, in a long, dark wig, plays King Charles II, who bans the profligate Wilmot from London, then brings him back. Wilmot is an over-indulgent pan-sexual who apparently is also a gifted poet, though we don't get much of a sense of his talents, either as a lover or a writer. (Strangely, Depp remains clothed in sex scenes, while most people around him do not.) He does, however, quote extemporaneous lines of verse while trolling about with his randy pals. He has a devoted wife (
Rosamund Pike, also in Pride & Prejudice), but develops an almost chaste fascination with a novice actress (Morton).

On a break from boozing and whoring, he sees her failed debut on stage, but he senses her potential and decides to coach her to become the diva of the London stage. We're supposed to buy that he is an impassioned believer in liberty, but his greatest delight seems to come in simply scandalizing British society.

Depp is such a talented actor that we can't help wanting to like him in any guise. But here it's a struggle. In fact, he addresses the camera early in the movie exhorting us not to like him.

So, grudgingly, we must comply. Though ultimately the dislike is for the entire movie - not just his licentious cipher of a character.

Rosamund Pike with Johnny Depp as the Restoration playwright John Wilmot
One Star1.5 Stars

THE LIBERTINE. With Johnny Depp, Samantha Morton, John Malkovich. Director: Laurence Dunmore (1:55). R: Language, sexual images.At the Angelika.

The two most common definitions of the word "libertine" describe people who (1) are free of religious convictions, and/or (2) lead an immoral life.

John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, the subject of Laurence Dunmore's dark and dreary "The Libertine," fulfilled both definitions - at least until his deathbed conversion to Anglicanism in 1680. He died at 33, same as Jesus, but from the self-inflicted tortures of syphilis and chronic drunkenness.

Not since Philip Kaufman's 2000 "Quills," the story of the Marquis de Sade, have we had so debauched a literary and movie hero, and Johnny Depp plays him with the relish of an actor who has made oddball characters his specialty.

"You will not like me," Wilmot promises us in an opening monologue spoken directly to the camera.

As the movie progresses, however, you will feel less dislike for the poet and playwright than boredom. Yes, he is a wanton cad, a user of men, women and kings, but his drunkenness is numbing and his debauchery is muted by his sincere, rather squandered love for his mistress, the actress Elizabeth Barry (Samantha Morton).

"The Libertine" covers the last few years of Wilmot's life, focusing mainly on his relationships with Barry, whom he mentors in the theater, and his patron, King Charles II (John Malkovich, with a prosthetic nose of near-Cyrano dimension).

As the story unfolds, Charles is summoning Wilmot from the Tower, where he has been imprisoned for some shocking literary offense. Wilmot often put his genius to use writing pornography, causing embarrassment even among the most open-minded literati of the Restoration era.

Charles commissions Wilmot to write and stage a play that will impress a French emissary who is about to visit London. And a what a show he puts on!

Resplendent with near-nude dancers and bedecked with erect phalluses - one the size of a very large cannon - the play is indeed impressive.

"In France," the emissary whispers to Charles, "he would be executed for this."

The production, which is preceded by handouts of carved dildos to audience members, is halted by the angry, humiliated king, and Wilmot is sent into hiding, where he continues his binge of drunkenness into its fifth and final year.

In the second half of "The Libertine," Wilmot is transformed into a stooped cripple with open sores on his face, dependent on the kindness of his long-suffering wife (Rosamund Pike) and his shrinking circle of friends.

His physical decline happens so fast, it feels as if someone has torn out 30 pages of the middle act of the script. In any case, "The Libertine," whose grainy images suggest it was shot on location with candlelight, becomes more of a gothic horror movie than an arresting biographical drama.

Originally published on November 25, 2005

By Matt Zoller Seitz

The Libertine
Directed by Laurence Dunmore

Every American leading man with a smidgeon of intellectual pretension would love to be compared to Marlon Brando, but only Johnny Depp really earns the comparison.

You could see Brando's characters working things out, sorting through their emotions and their place in the world, figuring out where they were in the narrative of their lives. Listen to how Brando's Don Vito Corleone says, "I like to drink wine more than I used to," as if touching the realization that he'll grasp with his next line: "Anyway, I'm drinkin' more." Brando caught characters in the act of becoming, and fixed the moment in a look or a gesture. He turned psychology into poetry. And no matter how high his star had risen or how low it had sunk, he always seemed as if he were having fun (even if you weren't). By treating every performance as an experiment while still conveying a sense of fun, Brando grasped multiple meanings in the line, "The play's the thing."

Depp shares all these qualities, along with Brando's glimmers of cynicism and cruelty and hints of decadent boredom. Despite Depp's pay increase after Pirates of the Caribbean, he still seems an outlaw in the Brando sense—an actor who consistently pushes against audience expectations and who treats each part as a puzzle, a game and a chance to see what he can get away with. His performances for Tim Burton strike deliberately dissonant notes; he played the hero of Sleepy Hollow as a fluttery, fainting basket case, and the title character in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as a self-created social autistic, so accustomed to solitude that the mere likelihood of human interaction made his skin crawl. Sean Penn evokes Brando's brute poet workingman aspect, and Russell Crowe has some of his meat-slab physicality, but neither taps Brando's prankster aspect, his seductive theatricality or his fondness for dancing along the edges of cliffs. That's Depp.

As the alcoholic, adulterous, whoring, self-destructive, unabashedly base poet hero of the 1670s period piece The Libertine, Depp confirms his 'Brandosity' as never before. This is the kind of borderline sometimes over-the-line movie star grotesque performance Brando gave in the '60s: self-aware, even self-analytical, but also instinctual and impulsive. Depp plays John Wilmot, the 2nd Earl of Rochester, as a man who, through adventure and grave misfortune, comes to understand himself more fully, and then asks himself whether he wants to act on that knowledge.

Depp's playing that old standby, the self-destructive, fringe-dwelling artist biting the royal hand that feeds him. When asked by the king to create a literary masterpiece for the age, he delivers a play that represents the king as a huge dildo. But he pushes against cliché by not getting too sentimental about the man. His grotty performance suggests that Wilmot's disregard for propriety, his mockery of the all things royal and his specific refusal to respect his patron, King Charles II. These acts were the logical outgrowth of how he lived his life: as a creature of appetite, a man who considers "restraint" a dirty word. There's nothing cute about Wilmot, a decadent, sexist lout with a cruel sense of humor and a tendency to behave as if the rest of humanity were extras in the drama of his life. He kidnapped his wife, played by Rosamund Pike, and won her love only to begin cheating on her with a prostitute played by Kelly Reilly. He soon begins a second affair with rising London stage star Elizabeth Barry, played by Samantha Morton, and even when he's enjoying himself, he never stops needling people, even friends. Sometimes Wilmot seems indifferent to the hurt he causes, and other times he seems to delight in it. It's his way of keeping himself amused. Depp grasps that Wilmot's love of theater and his tendency to turn his own life into melodrama can be traced to the character's aloofness, his emotional numbness; he makes life more extreme because it's the only way he can feel alive. "I cannot feel in life," he admits. "I must have others do it for me in the theater." The character's delight in upsetting people mirror's Depp's delight in trying to find out how unlikable he can be without driving the audience away.

It's a great Depp part because Depp's seemingly deep distrust of being liked is built right into the character. The story begins with brief monologues by Wilmot inquiring about his own likability, but by the end, it's clear that neither the movie nor Wilmot nor Depp particularly care whether we like or don't like what we see, as long as we find it interesting. Similarly, the movie is a rare historical drama that doesn't try to pretend that people in another era were exactly like us, only with different clothes. Elizabeth's disgust over sexism isn't depicted as evidence that she was some kind of feminist pioneer, merely as a pioneering professional's resentment of forces holding her back. She has no illusions about her second-class status, and when Wilmot offers to tutor her on a new, more naturalistic style of acting, she checks his intentions by asking why he doesn't just buy her sexual services for a flat monthly fee. While Wilmot's tutoring of Elizabeth is believable, his specific notes are not; it's as if he's trying to turn a stage actress into a film actress 250 years early.

The Libertine began its life as play by Stephen Jeffreys that premiered at the Steppenwolf Theater, with Malkovich playing Wilmot; the movie version had a long, troubled gestation it was nearly derailed when funding collapsed, and it took about a year and a half to hit theaters. Jeffreys' screen adaptation of his own text doesn't knock itself out trying to pretend it was never a play. The characters, particularly the hero, are conceived as representative types in a familiar type of narrative; the script expresses its ideas mainly through language. First time director Laurence Dunmore, a veteran of slick commercials, runs in the opposite direction here, shooting much of the action with a handheld camera, often by candlelight, and pushing in close to show you the sweat and grime on the actors' faces and their shoes squishing through muddy streets. The style works, but it's grindingly obvious. And it's not nearly as rich and exciting as what Depp attempts in his performance, which mixes purity and decadence, wisdom and juvenile crassness, broad strokes and fine brushwork, and never pauses to worry whether we like, or will ever like, the result. Wilmot insulates himself against fear of artistic failure by telling himself that detractors fall into two categories, the stupid and the envious. "The stupid will like you in five years' time," he tells Elizabeth, "the envious never." Words to act by.

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