Johnny Depp, an actor who not only takes chances, but seeks them out with a ferocity to match the considerable talent at his disposal, is not, alas, enough to save THE LIBERTINE. Adapted from the play of the same name by its author, Stephen Jeffreys, this intimate look at John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, a master of debauchery, poet of merit, and pal of Charles II (co-producer John Malkovich in a suitably pointy nose), fails to give the viewer any reason for wanting to know anything about either him or his escapades.
There is little focus to be found here, besides watching Rochester, or Johnny as he is known familiarly to royalty and pleb alike, wallow in the licentiousness of the age. Of that there was much, as though England was trying to make up for all the lost time under the Puritan Protectorate of Cromwell. Where the film goes supremely wrong is to echo exactly the enormous, nihilistic boredom of the man. For all the rampant sexuality, enunciated (explicitly) and enacted (less so), it’s a tedious two hours, rife with muted colors, stifled yawns, and overweening shadows from which the characters barely emerge. Neither the man’s spark of genius with a quip nor his diabolically irresistible charm is anywhere in evidence. Depp, true to the script rather than the character, is lost in a muddle not unlike the alcoholic haze in which Rochester spent his adult years, the which, coupled with a venereal disease, killed him at 33.
After so much excess, life is of little interest to Rochester, but the stage holds special charms, and not just the actresses that are available for, ahem, private performances after the curtain has gone down. For reasons that are never made clear, he is drawn to a plain and plainly untalented thespian (Samantha Morton), whom he takes under his tutelage in order to turn her into the finest actress in London. We are given to understand that he falls in love with her, though the hot passion that is supposed to be there, and which plays out for the viewer in some details of corsets and bed sheets, fails to do much more than maintain room temperature. Morton, for her part, appears to be bravely suffering after-school detention rather than a life-changed experience. She never conveys anything other than her character’s initial, intense, dislike of Rochester though she is supposed to eventually share his tender affections.
As for the other people in his life, they seem to adore him: his long-suffering wife who has a bad case of the hots for him; the king, who frets about France and Parliament and money and wants Rochester to make it all better by writing a play and taking his seat in the House of Lords; his manservant with the apt name of Alcock, and a host of others, high- and lowborn who can’t seem to get enough of his abuse. That they are all dull as the art direction only adds to the general malaise of the exercise. It all culminates in a pornographic verse play that is the final straw for Charles and in a physical devolution for Rochester as he is on the run that makes mere post-mortem decay pale in comparison.
There may have been something profound in the play that has failed to make the transition to cinema. Certainly the pro- and epilogues, spoken by Depp directly to the camera disdainfully telling us that we won’t like him has a portentous ring to it, if not substance. The adaptation itself is a disaster, with the artificiality of reality folding surreally in on itself to accommodate the proscenium format and modern sensibilities retained while at the same time attempting reality’s verisimilitude with mud and rats and wide vistas. While that effect is jarring, it is nothing compared to the tricky camera moves in which Laurence Dunmore engages with a something approaching giddiness. The camera bobs and weaves and ducks and swats and then, just as resolutely, becomes static, standing at a remove from the action, unsure in its resolve in either case of what it wants to represent to the audience or why
THE LIBERTINE is not merely bad. It is a supremely distasteful piece of work that squanders time, talent, and one of the more eccentric literary legacies.
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