Brandosity
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.