The Libertine
dir. Laurence Dunmore
The Weintstein Co.

Pauline Kael famously slagged A Clockwork Orange, saying it was basically "The Professor Does Pornography," and one might have expected that to describe The Libertine as well. Who but the professors and the literati know or care anything about John Wilmott, Earl of Rochester and pornographic poet of the Restoration? Alas, the film is more "John Ashcroft Does Pornography." No misogynist cleric ever composed a more horrific parable on the wages of sin than The Libertine. There's plenty of very explicit talk about sex, nudity, simulated sex, an orgiastic staging of Rochester's "A Ramble in St. James's Park" and a production number with dancing dildos and Kong-sized schlong. But somehow the talk is more off-key than off-color, and the sex just looks grubby, awkward, degrading and uncomfortable. At one point we are visually invited to think about the smells (perhaps Odorama cards should have been distributed). One comes away from The Libertine wondering why people are even tempted by the flesh. In fairness, this is somewhat consistent with the tone of Rochester's poems, most of which are more grotesque than titillating. But the poems are also rather funny, which The Libertine is decidedly not. We join Rochester, "the Lord of Wits," in the downward portion of his rake's progress, when his legendary sense of humor seems to have deserted him.

This film should soar. Its stars — Johnny Depp, Samantha Morton and John Malkovich — are among the world's best screen actors. The production, expanded from Stephen Jeffreys' Stoppardesque play-within-a-play, is lavish, with opulent sets, locations and costuming, and vivid recreations of period London, high and low. But it never lifts off, never turns away from its didactic underpinnings long enough to engage. It's unclear if this is the director's fault or the writer's or both, but it's a classic illustration of how Hollywood can combine numerous sure-fire elements into a vast dud.

Depp opens the film addressing the audience in the most misconceived prologue of all time. "You will not like me," he predicts as Rochester. It seems like the authors, having gotten the test reports from Canoga Park, have decided to use reverse psychology on the audience. (Instead they provided a lead graph for troglodytic newspaper critics.) He then goes on to make absurd and repellent predictions about how the women in the audience will want him, and the men will envy him, and how all will go home afterwards and "shag." Earl of Rochester, meet Austin Powers.

Anachronistic etymology aside (surely Rochester would have said "fuck"), the prologue also promises something we never get. Rochester hardly shags anybody, and when he does both parties keep all their clothes on; plus, it's established that he's all poxed up with syphilis, etc., from the get-go, so there's a serious eww-factor in the mere thought of someone touching him.

It's certainly a brave role for Depp, whose oeuvre may be the most various of any big star since Peter Sellers. One can definitely see the appeal for the guy who played Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood and Cry-Baby. He gets to do serious stuff and also to do more actor's drag, to bury his bankable beauty in make-up and prostheses. And he gets to go to the same wastrel-genius place he did with Hunter S. Thompson. Depp, at least, is clearly having fun.

Samantha Morton is another story. She was so wonderful as the mute girlfriend in Sweet and Lowdown it seemed certain she'd go straight to the A-list. After that she did the fabulous Jesus' Son and was so pitch-perfect as townie siren she seemed to have been scooped up, in thermal underwear, from the writer-strewn streets of Iowa City. She drew effusive praise for Morvern Callar and In America. But her role here is a misstep. She plays Elizabeth Barry, an actress struggling on the Restoration stage. It must have seemed a perfect role; she gets to be a fierce independent, the love interest, Rochester's pupil and a bad actress morphing into a good one. But she's miscast. Part of Barry's mystery is that she's plain — "horse-faced" one character calls her — yet she ultimately seduces from the stage. This would make perfect sense for the character, would account for her drive to transform and conquer. But Samantha Morton is abundantly neither plain nor horse-faced. And worse, far worse, is that we can't tell why the Restoration audiences boo her at first, and why she slays them after Rochester has done his Pygmalion thing. Inexplicably the authors represent role-development as a matter of simple repetitions, like body building. It's very odd in an adapted stage work that seems obsessed with role-play on stage, off-stage, and crossing the groundlings' divide.

Though he doesn't get to chew any scenery like he did as Valmont, Malkovich is fine as Charles II, giving him a certain stolid sense — long-suffering tolerance mixed with veiled malice. But we don't know what to make of his (or anybody else's) affection for Rochester. We never learn why Charles thinks Johnny Wilmot could be his Shakespeare. Rochester's story might have been an interesting meditation on the anti-hero. Indeed, for awhile it seemed like there might be something subversive about the film's Seinfeldian ethos ("No growing; no learning") since it's always plain there isn't going to be a come-to-Oprah moment of redemption. But the author forgot the jokes. At least since Aristophenes writers have understood that if your hero's not good, he should be funny. (If the production didn't include any of its own humorists, it would have been both easy and fitting to lift quips from the plays of George Etheridge; after all, Etheridge lifted them from Rochester.)

Finally, what really undercuts this project is its lack of narrative focus. Rochester in decline is paralytic with indecision — he can't leave his wife, or love her, can't commit to Elizabeth Barry, can't commit to art or eschew it, can't please the king, or stop wanting to. And the director seems to have caught the vacillating disease, giving each subplot a both/and non-resolution. It makes for an annoying tale, like Hamlet without the last act. Maybe that catches the truth of Rochester, but it gets in the way of a good story. What we're left instead with is a pathography, a portrait of the artist as untreated disease. Its nearly humorless, heatless, repellently graphic depiction of the period might serve as health-class hygiene film, but it gives libertinage a bad name.

— David Essex (djessex@earthlink.net)