As Lame & Incoherent as Pete Doherty
The Libertine Goes Down In the Dim Annals of the Weinstein Co.

With its sleazy main character, John Wilmot the second Earl of Rochester, addressing the camera during the opening credits and directly warning the audience that they will come to loathe him, The Libertine is not aiming for the static-cling of two-star reviews. But more noteworthy is how the film sets off on a voyage to the Land of the Lewd, then suddenly abandons the trip and fails with embarrassingly scarce tact to net any admiration.

The Libertine is a magnum opus of a failure, one that’s not being Gigli-ified by pop culture because it’s too faux-art house-edgy for nightly news and too quaint and obscure to splash a monologue by Jimmy Kimmel. Eighteen months after The Libertine first screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, here it comes, limping pathetically, almost sardonically, into theatres.

Johnny Depp and John Malkovich, two of the great risk-taking, mysterious popular actors of their generation, have their performances suffocated by dire, murky cinematography and storytelling that is unintelligible. Depp’s performance as a hard-living, uninhibited poet is alluring in its call for filthiness, but overall the character is not Tony Montana enuff to distract attention from rookie director Laurence Dunmore’s ugly tangle of mistakes, pretension, and abhorrent judgment.

Treading early on in the lowbrow plot set-up of the ugly-duckling, a cliché concept commonly seen in tween cinema, Depp bets he can makeover a hapless actress (the gifted but miscast Samantha Morton) into the day’s most beloved theater star. His success is absurdly effortless in fact, with Morton vanishing soon thereafter so the story can shift to Depp’s history with Malkovich, who plays King Charles II. A single flamboyantly heated exchange between these two screen-chewers could have redeemed this botched flick, but Malkovich plays a rare cool hand, and does this well. Unfortunately, this mess demanded a prescription for verbal fireworks.

Dunmore had another obvious Hail Mary in tow to save his film. He should have turned on all the lights, shut everybody else the hell up, and permitted Depp to go totally bat-shit with wretched syphilis. On the contrary, Dunmore selfishly adopts the preposterous notion that he’s sculpting a director’s masterpiece, not an eccentric character-study by Depp, and paints scenes using faint candlelight. Terribly ineffective by itself, the hazy look clashes with the director’s other penchant for swinging the camera around in circles like a kid short on marbles playing with a family camcorder. The kinetic gimmickry fails to spark whatever emotions were theorized to pop out from all the dizziness, and so amateurish and sloppy is this production one wonders how the film even saw the darkness of a matinee after earning an infamous scowl of the Weinsteins. Costumes are completely uninspired for a period piece, in all seriousness nearing the lame ranks of the preceding AMC “please silence your cell phones” opera-set commercial. Any remaining sense of realism or entertainment withers.

The Libertine isn’t just another bad modern movie, because it chooses to plow shamelessly into the offensively-bad niche in face of a capable cast that excels with such zany material. Depp’s opening warning seems like a knowingly cool infomercial for a product with less value, practical and artful usefulness as a bag of glass. So, one would think Dunmore’s career would be finished, right? For his next project he’ll film the flawlessly titled memoir A Million Little Pieces.

-Shawn Wines