Now Burton (surely one of the few working auteurs who is a
recognizable brand to the general public) and author Seth Grahame-Smith (his
novel Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
has been turned into a big studio release for later this summer) have adapted
the show into a feature film. I have no idea how accurately the show’s tone and
content have been adapted – I simply haven’t had the time nor the inclination
to give it much of a go – but what is clear is that Burton has created a
sumptuously imagined film that builds its own crooked world out of a variety of
influences. It plays like a Hammer horror film, specifically one of Christopher
Lee’s Dracula pictures – he, Lee, not Dracula, has a cameo here – filtered through
an American gothic (with additional shades of Washington Irving’s “Sleepy
Hollow” or Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”), all told in a groovy
half-camp Burton style.
The story starts in the 1700s when the family Collins leaves
Liverpool and sails for Maine. There, the family establishes the seaside town
of Collinsport on the back of a productive fishing business. A big beautiful
mansion is built and all seems well. But young Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp, of course)
spurns the attentions of a servant girl (Eva Green) who turns out to be a
witch. And so she puts the Collins family under her devious curses. She conjures
a situation that kills Barnabas’s parents and later, her broken heart still
smoldering, puts Barnabas’s fiancé (Bella Heathcote, big-eyed and pale) into a
trance and forces her to walk off the edge of a cliff. To top it all off, the angry
witch turns Barnabas into a vampire, which adds layers of whitish-grey makeup
to his face and hands. (When he feeds, bright red dribbles of blood dot either
side of his lower lip in a clear reference to Christopher Lee’s vampiric look.)
She turns the town against him, and watches as the angry mob locks him in a
coffin and buries him deep.
The plot picks up in an exquisitely detailed and beautifully
heightened 1972, filled up with period fashions and super-cool vintage music
cues to set the mood. (And Lee’s Dracula
A.D. 1972 is playing at Collinsport’s downtown theater, a nice touch.) The
Collins remain a cursed family. Their fishery is shuttered and the remaining
family members are cooped up in the cavernous mansion: the matriarch (Michelle
Pfeiffer), her surly teen daughter (Chloe Grace Moretz), her brother (Jonny Lee
Miller) and his troubled son (Gulliver McGrath). Also on hand are the alcoholic
groundskeeper (Jackie Earle Haley), the new nanny (Bella Heathcote again, some
nice visual foreshadowing), and the youngest Collins’s boozy, tragically vain
child psychiatrist (Helena Bonham Carter). This is a wonderfully droll cast
giving terrific performances that underplay the oddities and eccentricities of
the family’s life, which only enhances the hilarious gags and heightened tones.
A couple of early dining room scenes have some of the same pacing and likable
snap of similar moments in Burton’s Beetlejuice.
Also like that film, this one soon becomes a movie in which an odd outsider
shakes up the routine of an eccentric family in surprising, supernatural ways.
When construction workers dig up Barnabas’s coffin, they
awaken a deadly fish-out-of-water movie as this long-lost relative stumbles
back into town and, despite befuddlement on his part and confusion on theirs,
wants to help his skeptical kin regain control of the town’s fishing empire. It’s
a quest made all the more urgent when the porcelain-skinned C.E.O. of the rival
fish company turns out to be none other than the same immortal witch who cursed
him two centuries prior. Theirs is a twisted love affair, less love-hate, more
she loves-and-hates, he mostly just hates. She’s an exuberantly frisky kind of
evil; he’s just puzzled by his surroundings and only wants what’s best for his
family and would very much like her out of the way. It’s a juicy hook, for
sure, but with all of these other characters interacting with Barnabas as well,
and each with their own little subplots of varying importance, the movie’s
biggest flaw is its overstuffed qualities.
The movie is overflowing with plot and character in ways
that obfuscate a strong central interest, making the whole thing lumpy and often
without momentum. What are we supposed to think about Barnabas, a good man and
a cursed man who is at once a source of humor and a scary monster? He’s the butt
of culture clash jokes, but he also kills (no spoilers) some characters who are
quite likable and hardly wholly villainous. The film’s never quite sure what to
do with him and if Depp knows, and I suspect he might, he isn’t given the
chance to let us in. That leaves this main thread curiously unresolved. But the
other characters wander in and out of the film as well, moving in and out of
focus. Some go missing for long stretches of time, even ones that are so very
prominent to emotional beats of the overarching narrative. Still, I shrugged
off such nagging thoughts rather easily, filing them away as an unsuccessful
attempt at feature-length homage to soap opera plotting.
Besides, this is a movie with characters that are just plain
fun to be around and with a style to luxuriate in. Burton, with the great French cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, films it all with a
colorful style, genre piece as groovy period piece. Here’s a movie rich in
atmospherics both comic and mildly frightening, dripping with a great sense of
visual play. I particularly liked a scene in which a person gets their blood
sucked while they’re in the middle of getting a blood transfusion. Burton leaves
the I.V. bag in the foreground as it slowly then suddenly crumples in on itself
like a used juice box.
Some have found Burton’s use of computer-driven effects in
recent years to be excessive and, oddly enough, a limit on his imagination.
Fair enough, if we’re talking about his Alice
in Wonderland, which, aside from a few nice touches, felt more like a
generic movie he was hired to coat in a Burton gloss. To me, Sweeney Todd and, to a lesser extent, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory feel
just as wonderful as, though certainly different from, his earlier, more
tactile, effects work. With Dark Shadows
he shows admirable restraint, so that by the time the effects hit the fan, it’s
a natural outgrowth of the satisfying strangeness that’s come before, spectacle
that’s been very well earned. It’s a film that wears its darkness lightly and
falls into a satisfyingly funky groove.
No comments:
Post a Comment