By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com
Wilmington on DVDs: Dark Shadows
DVD PICK OF THE WEEK: NEW
DARK SHADOWS (Three Stars)
U.S.: Tim Burton, 2012
The original TV “Dark Shadows” was a hell of a soap, a classic of ‘60s-’70s pop/trash culture. When you watch it today, you can almost hear a ghostly backdrop chorus of Nixon and McGovern speeches, Walter Cronkite reporting the Vietnam War news, and hit after hit by the Rolling Stones. But, in the new Johnny Depp version, Depp and director Tim Burton treat Shadows more reverently than they should, almost like a classic, period.
They mount it gorgeously, load it up with top-of-the-line talent, headed by Depp as the series’ classy camp vampire Barnabas Collins. And they fill the dark spaces around Barnabas with stunning star actresses and creepy, villainous supporting actors, all backed by a ‘70s soundtrack laced with non-Stones hits and pop-camp like The Carpenters’ “Top of the World” and Barry White and The Moody Blues‘ “Nights in White Satin.“ (Karen Carpenteer’s creamy, ultra-mellow dulcimer of a voice, Barry White’s virile purr and the crashing waves of “Nights in White Satin” become terrifying by association.)
The filmmakers also take a lead character, Barnabas C., who was an epicene icon, and they let Depp (who interprets many roles with a gay slant) make Barnabas so unabashedly straight (I thought) with his lady loves — Eva Green in Lara Parker’s old role of witch/bitch Angelique Bouchard and Bella Heathcote as both eternal 18th century ladylove Josette Duprez and ’70s governess Victoria Winters — that they either die or kill for love of him.
There’s also no shortage of divas and ingenues at Collins Manor: Michelle Pfeiffer, in a striking return, plays noir goddess Joan Bennett‘s old role of matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, that unquiet Brit Helena Bonham Carter takes Grayson Hall‘s part of untraditional psychotherapist Dr. Julia Hoffman and Chloe Grace Moretz does Elizabth’s languid smarty-pants teenage daughter Carolyn Stoddard.
The males in Shadows, include Jonny Lee Miller, unlikably playing the the spineless Roger Collins, Elizabeth’s brother and father of the eerily self-possessed tyke David (Gully McGrath), plus Jackie Earle Haley as the spooky-looking hired hand Willie Loomis, who gives a shot of needed anti-glamour to one of the more glamorous-looking vampire movies ever. And last but not least, there’s Alice Cooper, who plays ghoulish front man at the Collins’s not-quite-Ambersons ball.
The story, cannily but not too compellingly supplied by screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith (author of “Zombies and Pride and Prejudice“), is set in 1972, the year Nixon was resoundingly elected and about the time of the original TV show (which ran from 1966 to 1971). The show begins with a high-melodramatic prelude in which the Collins family travels to the New World, starts up the the city of Collinsport and the lucrative Collins fishery, and the dashing but peculiar Barnabas wins the hearts of both angelic Josette and devilish Angelique.
It all ends (in the beginning) in the deep, dark, dreadful Gothic night, with Barnabas and Josette perched at the top of a high Gothic cliff, above crashing Gothic waves — he falls, she falls, he can’t save her –and evil Angelique gets him vampirized and buried in a chained box. 200 years later, Barnabas is dug up and awakened by a group of hapless workmen who are immediately bitten and killed. “I’m thirsty,” the well-mannered Barnabas explains, and returns to Collins manor (it‘s gone to seed and so has the fishery), where he’s greeted by Loomis and Elizabeth. The movie plunges into the horror-as-soap-opera shtick we expect, the relentless demonic seductions of Angelique, and eventually more mad love and cliffs.
Critically, there was something of a split decision on Burton’s Dark Shadows, trending negative, and I guess I fall in the middle — a sometimes enthusiastic middle. The movie is dry and droll and very, very pretty, but not particularly funny, surprising or inventive, except in the ways it collides Barnabas with the ‘70s. (He thinks TV is a sorcerer‘s box filled with little sorceresses singers, and he also thinks Alice Cooper is the ugliest woman he’s ever seen).
The things that are good about Dark Shadows are things that we usually expect to go right in a Burton movie (though that doesn’t make them any less good): all those elegantly horrific, witty, lush and magnificently playful Tim Burton visuals, which summon up the exaggerated wonders of movies when we’re young.
And there’s the enticingly moviestar-ish cast. The unsmiling Depp crosses a bit of Jonathan Frid (the first immortal Barnabas, recently deceased), with Vincent Price’s tartness and Tyrone Power’s sweetness of spirit, while Pfeiffer holds the screen grande-dame-ishly, and, as always, niftily blonde-ishly. (Christopher Lee, Price’s sort of rival is here in the flesh, in a cameo. Carter chews up the film ferociously, and Moretz is is archly teenagery. The film’s great prize though, is Eva Green, who makes Angelique such a luscious strumpet and monster that she magnetizes you.
There’s a lot of potential in the new Depp-Burton film’s conjunction of actors, and also its mixture of horror and ‘70s pop, and sometimes Dark Shadows reaches it. There‘s almost everything Green does, in the 18th century or now. There’s an amusing scene where Barnabas hunkers down with a bunch of blissed-out hippies at a mellow night gathering — one of the few moments when the movie lets in the reality of the Vietnam era. Maybe Burton isn’t reaching his potential here, but how many of us do?
The movie entertains us, in at least a somewhat adult way, even if it mostly tries to evoke a passion of long ag, the ’70s, Tim Burton’s youth. That’s not the top of the world, and it’s not even close, but it’s something.
Extras: Featurettes