Category: tim burton

The eighth collaboration of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp is their most lifeless and least necessary yet.

Tim Burton and Johnny Depp need some fresh air.

Their new film “Dark Shadows” marks their eighth collaboration in 22 years and fifth since 2005. In all those films, Depp has only once played an ordinary  human being in non-fantasy costume...and that was as the cross-dressing schlockmeister hero of the terrific “Ed Wood.”  

In all of their other work together -- “Edward Scissorhands,” “Sleepy Hollow,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Corpse Bride,” “Sweeney Todd,” and “Alice in Wonderland” -- Depp has played deeply outré characters in flamboyant outfits, wigs and makeup, sometimes finding human emotion beneath the grotesquerie but more often, and more commonly as time has passed, wandering off into self-amusement and obscurity.

This can be fun, I grant you.  Nobody in movies has ever quite had Depp’s gift for disappearing into so many variations on the comic and the bizarre, and Burton is almost always audacious in mounting spectacles born of youthful fantasies and nightmares.  But the two have returned so often to a single brand of inspiration that they no longer spark a frisson -- in the audience or, one suspects, in each other.  There’s a dulling sameness to the characters, the themes, the tenor.  Oh, sometimes the comedy is in the depravity and sometimes vice versa, but it’s all been cut from the same cloth, and after all this time the cloth has worn so thin that it’s become transparent.

And so “Dark Shadows,” in which the pair attempt to sprinkle their fairy dust on the gothic daytime soap opera that became a national sensation in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, making an unlikely pop hero of the vampire Barnabas Collins whose family manor, Collinwood, was the setting for the show.  (Collins was played by Jonathan Frid, who died in April and has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him cameo as a party guest in this film.)

In the hands of Burton and at least three writers, much of the original tale remains in place: after two centuries of entombment, Barnabas is awoken to find that the year is 1972, the Collins family’s fortunes have crumbled, his old-time nemesis, the witch Angelique, runs the town of Collinsport, and his long-dead love, Josette, has been reincarnated, or seems to have been, as the governess Victoria Winters.

But, really, it’s more set-up than story:  the film grinds through a number of subplots that don’t resonate with one another and don’t add up to a narrative with any momentum or tension.  There’s some gore and some CGI tomfoolery, but mainly Burton plays it for laughs, making it all the more depressing that so little of it is funny:  Depp’s delivery and arcane argot can amuse, the conventions of soap opera craft are drily mocked, and there are one or two cheeky bits about Barnabas’ encounters with modernity, but that’s it.  For hours.  It’s a slog.

Depp, as I say, almost can’t help but hold your interest, but watching him work yet another variation on this mock-morbid trope most certainly neither surprises nor excites.  Chloë Grace Moretz charms a mite as a rebellious young Collins, and Helena Bonham Carter has some fun as a drunken psychiatrist.  But Eva Green as Barnabas’s foe, Bella Heathcote as his love interest, and Michelle Pfeiffer as the modern head of the Collins family are bloodless, no matter the energies they expend.

Indeed, ‘bloodless’ is the word for the whole enterprise.  Lord knows that Burton is an inventive fellow, and he’s capable of bringing all sorts of esoteric to pulsing life.  But it’s been a long time since he’s made a start-to-finish satisfying film -- and, perhaps coincidentally, nine years since he’s made one without Depp.  That walk in the fresh air that I suggested the two of them need?  I should add that it would be best if they took it in opposite directions....
    
(111 min., PG-13, multiple locations) Grade: C