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. NY Press – By Matt Zoller Seitz.
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. 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 clich
