In terms of movie-going, there are many things to be thankful for and high on my list is the existence of Johnny Depp: a gorgeous dude with precise, chiseled features who, despite the mainstream looks, has consistently chosen leftfield roles — from the freakish (“Edward Scissorhands”) to the lop-sided (“Ed Wood”) to the difficult/nuanced (“Dead Man”) to the downright campy (“Pirates of the Caribbean”)- By KAORI SHOJI.
Johnny Depp is “The Libertine.” (c) 2005 STANLEY (IOM) PRODUCTIONS LIMITED. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
These roles have defined his career and he’s matured into an actor who with a single glance or a flexing of his fingers, can change the entire ambience of the screen into something that is at once, more textured, meaningful, infinitely suggestive. To watch a Johnny Depp film is to understand his character (and, by implication, the story) more profoundly. It’s to experience an impact on the senses that few of his contemporaries can deliver.
And now “The Libertine” shows him at his most snarky and audacious; the film opens with a monologue in which he ensnares the camera with a shifty gaze to assure us: “You will not like me.”
Depp is John Willmot, second earl of Rochester, a brilliant but despicable rogue who drank and generally debauched himself to death at the age of 33 and in the process managed to offend most of the aristocracy of London during the Restoration. The earl had been a gallant soldier during his youth and helped King Charles II reclaim the throne from Oliver Cromwell, but from his late 20s onward, he repeatedly fell out of favor by authoring obscene verse that poked scathing, ribald fun at the crown. The movie suggests utter boredom and self-loathing drove the earl to depravity, and here Depp’s performance suggests that the earl was how he was because he could be no other way.
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