Hard to Stomach, Even Harder to Dismiss.
The beginning scene deceived me. It was brilliant, sexy, dark, and alluring.
From there I expected the rest to be the same. It wasn't. It isn't that the movie was too bad, it is that it was slow moving. I guess I shouldn't have expected too much more since it is based off the life of the Earl of Rochester.
All actors are superb in it. Depp once again proves his abilityto transform into character (at one point nearly hideously) while keeping his own entity at the same time. It's that talent that makes any role of his desirable. not a movie to uplift, enlighten, and comfort..
.. But a movie that seems to take the nightmare
that reality can sometimes become, and twists it into forms that all of us know, without ever having needed to approach themin reality- a moral play about the evils of a life devoted to complete debauchery.. .. Even whilethe Earl of Rochesterbecomes a sympathetic character, which is remarkable, for someone who does nothing worthwhile, and much that it reprehensible, for the majority of the movie.
We come along towards the end of his life, at a time when he has began to distance himself from his wife and, indeed, everyone else. When he finds, as one character puts it, his deathbed bride.
And we see the straits thatcan bring a person to. The depths of confusion, strange pinnacles of self-sacrifice,depending on circumstance and character. And we see, in the depths of a forever-ago England, an actress, a prostitute, and a single mother, all wrapped into the same character with an undying well of self-respect, while the Earl, who was at least theoretically given every privilege and advantage, squandering it all on cynicism and carnal enjoyments only half appreciated through over-satiation.
His friends play a solid role, his wife a somewhat more significant one, but the real drama is between those two. Johnny Deppas he absolutely dares us to like him. 【John Malkovich】Libertine【Johnny Depp】 The Fascination of the Grotesque
This is a film full of excess, lovingly applied with a paint roller.
It begins with a soliloquy
(perhaps appropriately, since the film is an adaptation of a play, championed by John Malkovich, which was inspired by his performance in Dangerous Liaisons).
That some of the lines are quite good is buried beneath the exhaustion of staring at that face, shot in gritty,
low-light film stock - giving us perhaps a more realistic cinematography but one as grainy and hard to see as Jabberwocky. That, I suppose, is what makes Rochester a 17th-Century Anton LaVey, creating his own Church of Satan,
but without either a website or a flair for organization.
But can hedonism, alone, explain his actions when he chooses to push the experiment in a variety of directions ? I don't want to give away too much.
We watch him die, and how horribly, rotting away from syphillis, but somehow at peace, finally having accomplished something
he thought of as worthwhile. This isnot a film for the kids,nor is it an evening of entertainment for the weakkneed, weak stomached or weak of heart. It takes patience to watch,in all its grainy gloominess. On the other hand, there are revelations of character that are far too good to pass up. If you can sit through the gritwithout feeling you're watching porn, you'll see Oscar-worthy performances delivered by John Malkovich
and Samantha Morton - not to mentionJohnny Depp. That is, I believe, the real message of the movie- how the Greater powers of love & death
can bring even the most devoted reprobate to a sense of rightness, a need for some sense of self-worth.