Word: depp
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...Johnny Depp was originally to play Bauby, but Pirates of the Caribbean came along to monopolize his time. So director Julian Schnabel, whose previous films, Basquiat and Before Night Falls, were studies of artists isolated from their surroundings, had the sensible idea to make this story -of a Frenchman and his French medical angels -in French, with Mathieu Amalric as Bauby (or, as he is called in the film, Jean Do). The result is an affecting, imaginatively told parable of human triumph over excruciating obstacles: instead of My Left Foot, this is My Left...
...Matter of fact, you wish they'd given Depp more to do. He enters the film quite late and, as usual, his performance is a canny blend of the minimal and the maximal. What laughs the films offer derive from his work, which consists of putting a kind of ironic, post-modernist spin on the antique conventions of the Yo-Ho-Ho genre. At one point in the proceedings someone asks of Sparrow, "Do you think he plans it all out, or just makes it up as he goes along?" Good question and one that's easily answered...
...Trapped in a theater, with the visual effects flaming all around you, and the make-up artists trying to top themselves with increasingly yucky creations, there's not much you can do except close your eyes and nostalgize the not very distant past, when Johnny Depp and friends first offered their cheeky variants on the long-dormant pirate genre. If, by some miracle you doze off-hard to do with the thunderous score continually throbbing, and the yelling and explosions respectively yammering and thundering-don't worry. Wide awake you can't follow this story...
...that bit of middlebrow critical jargon worm its way into this context? - it has to do with father figures. They come and they go, causing a good deal of consternation among their offspring. The codger most appreciated by the audience is Keith Richards, well known to be Depp's inspiration for his character. He appears here as Jack Sparrow's old man, and he got a relieved round of applause at the screening I attended. Up to then the audience had been pretending to have a good time, even though it was succumbing to an increasingly sullen silence...
...Fall brings Across the Universe, a 1960s love story set to Beatles songs, directed by The Lion King's Julie Taymor, with a cast including Evan Rachel Wood and Bono. And at year's end, just in time for Oscar season, comes Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd, starring Johnny Depp as the murderous barber in an adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's musical thriller...