This is the point at which I diverge quite violently from all those who enjoy fantasy-based world-building — Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, et al. I know many of you will be software engineers or molecular geneticists, and hence can’t be expected to care about unrealistic dialogue or acting, but at least I get that you see the world quite differently. Tried though I have to sit through GOT, I’ve rarely managed more than a couple of minutes, though have been impressed by the visuals, to the point of looking up to check how much it costs to make. The astonishing answer is around $15,000,000 an episode.
Likewise for the baroque Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (budget $200,000,000), in which you can see, or easily guess, where the money’s gone — on the visual effects, and re-stocking of Johnny Depp’s wine cellar. This seems to me like a straight-to-video performance by Depp — looking like he probably does sans makeup after a torrid week hanging out with his band, Hollywood Vampires, and getting through a barrel of ketamine — but to be honest this is all the role calls for, and he’s less irritating than Eddie Redmayne, who gives basically the same performance as in The Theory of Everything (2014) and looks marginally more masculine than in The Danish Girl (2015).
I was mystified and bored, if occasionally stirred by an amusing turn of phrase or visual effect. A hotdog break didn’t help, even if salsa proved a viable alternative to mustard — and when I returned to the screening I still had no real idea what was going on in this elaborately imagined magic-world. I didn’t make it past the ninety-minute mark — but was actually preceded to the exit by two similarly-glazed couples.
Publicity around Johnny Depp suggests he is most well-known nowadays for profligate spending and a somewhat dissolute lifestyle, rather more than his creative output — but, either way, my principal points of convergence with him have been a shared interest in Hunter S. Thompson, and his brilliant performance in a brilliant film, Ed Wood (1994). Granted, Depp paid to have Thompson’s ashes shot into space, whereas I never even met him, let alone financed his funerary tribute — but Ed Wood stands head and shoulders above the rest of his oeuvre — a globally fascinating film that is immaculately photographed, funny, and adorned with numerous spot-on performances (notably those by Martin Landau, Bill Murray and Depp himself).
Otherwise, his career has been dominated by occasionally interesting if not exactly gripping work in movies with an overcrowded visual aesthetic — notably the seven collaborations with Tim Burton other than Ed Wood, and the Terry Gilliam misfire Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas* — superior Mafia flick Donnie Brasco (1997), and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, which I haven’t seen, having no interest.
Aside from Ed Wood, the Depp-Burton films all look horrible — particularly Alice in Wonderland (2010) — and deserve to be consigned to the garbage can of movie history or, at least, reserved for Burton completists with no visual sense.
*Actually, all Gilliam’s films are misfires, of course, with the exception of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), which is saved by flashes of comic genius — usually John Cleese’s — and Time Bandits (1981), which is watchable and doesn’t look like the entire contents of Gilliam’s imagination have been downloaded onto the screen. Fear and Loathing is a case in point — instead of Thompson’s superb prose, which conjures vivid images and comicality with great economy (“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold…”), the film version gives us the less-interesting sight of Depp stumbling around, intoxicated with psychedelics, which in any case misses the point. Thompson did, to be sure, take drugs and drink quite a lot, but the persona was a fictional creation that served usually comic purposes. That Depp is quite a different physical type to the lanky Thompson is less of a gripe, but the film falls into the trap (much like Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, 1991) of failing to recognize that the book’s brilliance rests with the prose itself.
FATAL VISIONS 