Five years ago this weekend Tim Burton’s updating of Dark
Shadows, the gothic/horror-themed soap opera which ran from 1966 to
1971 on ABC and was a seminal influence on a generation of budding horror fans
(including Burton), was released on American movie screens, one weekend after
Marvel’s The Avengers was still
dictating the imaginations (and the wallets) of moviegoers everywhere. Given
Burton’s track record with horror comedies (Beetlejuice
being the primary example) and collaborations with Johnny Depp (Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory, Edward Scissorhands), a surprisingly low number of
ticket-buyers seemed ultimately to care—the movie, which cost $150 million to
make, and undoubtedly a hefty chunk of change more than that to market, would
earn back only slightly more than half of that in the United States, though its
final take globally came in at around $235 million. There were a few takers
among critics, notably Manohla Dargis in the New York Times,
Andrew O'Hehir in Salon and, perhaps
with a little more ambivalence than the others, Richard Corliss in Time magazine, but
overall the reviews tended far more toward the tepid, if not outright hostile side.
My expectations were in the basement, so, as one of those budding horror fans for whom the original Dark Shadows was such a formative
experience, when I bought my ticket on that opening weekend five years ago I
was surprised and delighted to discover just how accurately Burton’s movie hit
my sweet spot. I ended up seeing Dark
Shadows about four times, in the company of a couple of good friends who
were just as enthusiastic about it as I was, before it was whisked out of
theaters along with its burgeoning reputation as one of Tim Burton’s lesser
achievements. And on this, the movie’s fifth anniversary, I’ve been jonesing to
see it yet again. So, I decided it might be a good time to revisit my original review, posted on Sergio Leone and the
Infield Fly Rule on June 2, 2012, in the hopes of stoking those flames for
myself and perhaps piquing the interest of someone who might have been passing
on Dark Shadows ever since then
because of all those grumpy reviews. Here’s what I had to say about Tim
Burton’s impassioned, jokey yet strangely reverent, surprisingly personal visit
to Collinwood Manor.
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Modern movie trailers usually don’t involve the blaring
hyperbole of old Hollywood hucksterism-- The SINGLE most SEARING and SENSUAL
SAGA ever to SWEEP across the BIG SCREEN!— or especially the blatant
three-card-Monte-style deception of exploitation trailers like those from the
glory days of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. (Every obsessive with a
computer terminal is watching too closely these days for anyone to get away
with that.) But even the best of today’s advance previews for big studio
product often share a very similar aroma of desperation with those classic
cinematic con jobs—the real difference, beyond a certain level of technical
sophistication, of course, is that the stakes are often much higher, with the
future financial viability of studios (or at least their executives) hanging in
the balance. So, marketing departments, never the industry’s most risk-taking
branch, tend to go bananas trying to pack every single element that might
appeal to the film’s target demographic, especially if the movie is
effects-heavy, into one 2.5-minute tracing of the movie’s entire narrative arc,
sensitivity to spoilers and variances of tone be damned. (Can you imagine how this movie might be sold to today’s A.D.D.-addled audiences, as
accustomed as they are to advance exposure to a movie’s every narrative
secret?)
And sometimes a trailer is so accurate to the experience of
watching the movie that 2.5 minutes is all anyone could be reasonably expected
to endure—expanded to feature length, watching the same image-splintering rate
of editing for two hours plus, enhanced by Hollywood’s most up-to-date
ear-searing sound, can begin to feel like staring into a strobe light from
inches away while seated on a crowded airport tarmac. (I submit to you Armageddon.)
And speaking of a trailer’s presumed relationship to the
thing it is promoting, the Twitterverse, that harsh realm of snark, self-righteous
acrimony and instant judgment, is a place where the release of a movie’s preview
is evaluated with as much scrutiny as the movie itself, often sealing
prejudicial points of view like mosquitoes in amber once the film is finally
released, despite the possibility that the preview may not accurately convey
the experience of actually seeing the movie itself. Certainly, the reception of
the trailer for 2012’s John Carter
exacerbated that bottom line-busting feature’s (unwarranted) bad buzz and fiery
demise, and one could have been forgiven for assuming The End Was Nigh based on
all the apocalyptic proclamations and Internet-equivalent traipsing around in
sackcloth and ashes upon first look at the trailer for The Three Stooges. (The Four Horsemen were nowhere near the
theaters where I twice saw the Farrelly Brothers’ slapstick tribute to the
original Stooges. And it turned out that the movie was hilarious.)
So, when the trailer for Dark Shadows was unleashed about a month before its May 11, 2012, release there was plenty of
wailing and gnashing of teeth, and I was right at the front of the line of
vocal worriers. The original show, produced by Dan Curtis, was a gothic soap
opera which ran from 1966 to 1971-- after a tepid first year it gained
unprecedented popularity by introducing to its cast Jonathan Frid as the
vampire Barnabas Collins, who would spearhead the show’s move into all-out
Hammer-influenced horror and suspense over the rest of its run and himself
become an unlikely object of all sorts of pre- and post-adolescent passion. But
many of us who carried fond memories of running home after school in a
desperate attempt to not miss a single second of the series felt stunned and
woefully let down by the trailer for Tim Burton’s new movie which, after a
suitably atmosphere-drenched beginning, devolved into a mirthless and desperate
minute and a half’s worth of wacky gags revolving around the attempt of a
200-year-old vampire (now played by Johnny Depp) to adjust to the glowing lava
lamp-lit world of America in the early ‘70s. I had to admit that based on what
I saw in the trailer, I could hold out little reasonable hope that this new
take on Dark Shadows would be one
that I would value or appreciate, and I carried those apprehensions with me as
I took my seat on opening weekend.
Tim Burton’s Dark
Shadows begins with the sound of flutes which cascade off of Danny Elfman’s
mournful orchestration like bitter rainfall-- the one musical motif in the
score directly attributable to the TV show's original composer Robert Cobert--
and Johnny Depp’s voice, wave-shifted into a resonant replica of Frid’s
sonorous British-tinged inflections, intoning, as the camera sweeps over a
picturesquely dank and fog-enshrouded 18th-century Liverpool, “It is said that
blood is thicker than water,” invoking the two liquids with which the
protagonist will soon become tragically familiar on the coastal rocks beneath
the cliffs of the aptly named Widows Peak. Barnabas, the son of a wealthy
entrepreneur who moves his family from England to America’s Northeast to
establish a foothold in the fishing industry, dares to spurn the obsessive
attentions of a lovely but intense chambermaid by the name of Angelique
Broussard (Eva Green)-- who happens also to be a witch with a nasty vengeful
streak. Angelique compels Barnabas’ true love, Josette (Bella Heathcote), to
suicide, and he himself is cursed with eternal, bloodthirsty life as a vampire
at her hand. With the help of the town’s easily manipulated torch-bearing mob,
she arranges to have her would-be lover buried alive, setting up a none-too-comfortable
200-year confinement in which he must contemplate his punishment and suffer his
newfound cravings.
At this point, Dark
Shadows shifts gears and segues forward to what turns out to be 1972, but
what’s immediately apparent is that the transition is not going to be as
jarring as that trailer seemed to promise. (The blissfully rich cinematography,
which also spans the centuries, comes courtesy of Bruno Delbonnel, who shot Amelie, A Very Long Engagement, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and
Inside Llewyn Davis.) The melancholy
of the movie’s opening is somehow extended over 200 years by helicopter shots
of a northbound Amtrak train snaking through the woods, and the music guiding
the train is not Elfman’s signature evocations of the fearful regret buried in
Cobert’s original score, but instead the Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin,”
which turns out, in this age of classic rock abuse, to be a perfectly sublime
choice.
On the train is a dead ringer for Josette, Victoria Winters (also played
by Heathcote), who is bound for a governess job at the dilapidated Collins
family estate—Collinwood—where the remains of Barnabas’s ancestry—Elizabeth
Collins Stoddard (Michelle Pfeiffer), her parasitical brother Roger (Jonny Lee
Miller), and their two respective children, Caroline and David (Chloe Grace
Moretz and the wonderfully named Gulliver McGrath)—are barely keeping the
mansion’s doors open. They have some help, such as it is, from groundskeeper
Willie Loomis (Jackie Earle Haley) and Dr. Julia Hoffman (Helena Bonham
Carter), the psychologist brought in three years earlier to help David cope
with the tragic drowning of his mother, but it’s clear that however haunted by
tragedy, the Collins family’s better days seem to be past.
Soon enough Barnabas, unearthed by unfortunate construction
workers who end up constituting his first happy meal in 200 years (the carnage
is loosed in the golden glow of the movie’s funniest bit of product placement),
joins his at-first suspicious but soon tentatively welcoming descendants in an
attempt to loosen the stranglehold on the family fishing business held by a
rival company, which just happens to be headed by a ruthless businesswoman who
bears a luscious resemblance to the vampire’s age-old nemesis. Here the movie
settles into its own groove, one marked by the contrast between the
Europeanized flavor of Barnabas’ anachronistic manner and language, permeated
as it is by the doomed romanticism of his gothic back story, and the laid-back
vibe of the Me Decade. It’s a happy revelation when Burton and screenwriter
Seth Grahame-Smith (working from a script originated by John August and
Grahame-Smith) demonstrate there’s more juice in that contrast than just
simple-minded Brady Bunch Movie-style
wisecracks and sight gags.
True, some of those gags wilt rather than blossom,
but even so Burton fashions terrific moments out of Barnabas’s encounters with
pop culture icons of the day like Super
Fly and a certain buzzing Milton Bradley board game, and the wit embedded
in Grahame-Smith’s dialogue is often sharper, more off-kilter funny than the
goods other filmmakers might have settled for. At one point Barnabas suggests
they throw a ball to reassert their family’s prominence in the town. Sullen,
stoned Caroline counters that no one throws balls anyone, they throw
happenings, ones that have live rock music and plenty of booze, to which
Barnabas replies, with his characteristically sonorous enthusiasm, “We shall
have spirits enough to fill a schooner’s hull!” (It is told that the low-grade
rumble created by Caroline’s epic eye-rolling could be discerned for countless
miles down the Eastern Seaboard.)
The movie is of course also in love with that gothic sensibility,
a surprising level of which is sustained marvelously by the sets, mixing the
dark-wooded, shadowy old world architecture of European influence with
shag-carpets, novelty phones and mile-wide lapels to hilarious effect. (The
movie's set design is by Rick Heinrichs, who has created, among many other
things, a spectacularly creepy/groovy chandelier for the main foyer of
Collinwood that, upon closer inspection, looks like a giant crystalline
octopus.) And it’s all topped off by a howlin’ wolf chorus of carved creatures
that surround the opening of a grand fireplace and signal the opening of a
secret passage into one of Collinwood’s deepest, darkest catacombs. But the
most surprising thing about Burton’s take on this material is how well
integrated the ‘70s comedy is with what amounts to not so much a parody of
familiar gothic tropes as a sincere celebration of them, and some of the
movie’s best instances of that celebration come in its use of the music of the
period.
One of my favorite moments in the entire movie comes when
Barnabas, in conversation with the newly sympathetic Elizabeth, sits at the
organ and bemoans his curse. He lays his weary head down on the keyboard, and
we ready ourselves for a gloriously ominous, full-throated pipe organ chord that
will express, in familiar aural terms, Barnabas’s tortured soul. What comes out
instead is ominous, all right, only the organ at which Barnabas sits turns out
to be one of those electric organs so ubiquitous in the ‘70s, the ones that
replaced less-affordable pianos in many homes and featured tacky built-in
rhythm machines. The chords accompanying Barnabas’s anguish end up accompanied
by a silly computerized conga beat that incongruously, and yes, gloriously
underscores all that agony and dissonant passion. Having already mentioned the
ghostly appropriateness of the Moody Blues, there’s also Moretz’s hilarious,
insinuating slink across the foreground of a family dinner to the strains of
Donovan’s “Season of the Witch.” (The use of Barry White’s “You’re the First,
My Last, My Everything” during Barnabas and Angelique’s comically violent sex
scene falls flat, however, largely because it’s too obvious and it doesn’t
similarly link up those two incongruous narrative themes.)
But special mention should be made of the movie’s use of
Alice Cooper as the evening’s entertainment at that aforementioned Collinwood
happening. Burton fashions what could simply have been a marketing hook and an
opportunity for a couple of wryly amusing lines (one of which you’ll be familiar
with from the trailer) into a spectacular set piece in which Cooper’s
performance of "The Ballad of Dwight Fry" is intercut with not only the action at the
dance (which includes, if you look very quickly, appearances by four veterans
of the TV series, including Frid, who died one month before this movie was
released), but also a flashback to Victoria’s brutally sad, literally haunted
childhood, neutralizing for the moment Heathcote’s somewhat recessive presence
and suffusing the movie with an resurrected rush of romantic, emotional
resonance between her and Barnabas. (It won’t be the last.)
Dark Shadows is a
surprise in so many ways, but the lukewarm reaction to it in some quarters begs
the question, has Tim Burton begun to wear out his welcome? (This recent parody seems to suggest as much.) Many might agree with one
critic I read who wrote that the new movie is a disappointment because “(it)
has much more to do with what goes on inside director Tim Burton's head than
with any TV show, no matter how beloved.” Which prompts me to pose a question
of my own-- Why shouldn’t it? Was not the Monument Valley of The Searchers and other John Ford films
largely a product of the director’s romantic imagination, recognizable as it
was reiterated by countless other directors in his wake? To be certain, Dark Shadows is an imperfect movie,
almost by its nature in its status as a Tim Burton joint. Certainly there’s
plenty of evidence here to spark the usual complaints, including the one that
suggests he’s more of an art director than a director (the perfect rebuttal to
which is that “Dwight Fry” sequence); or that he hasn’t the facility or the
interest to tell a straight story, a trait that many diverse, undisciplined and
acclaimed filmmakers worldwide share, by the way; or that he’s simply too
interested in the candy-colored goblins dancing inside his own skull to the
exclusion of everything else. (The movie of Burton’s I find most cloying and
overwrought in its bid to draw parallels between its director and its wounded,
oh-so-sensitive outsider hero-- Edward
Scissorhands-- is the one many count as among his best.)
Also, the general flatness of the Victoria/Barnabas romance
in Dark Shadows certainly bears the
stamp of a filmmaker who finds it the least interesting element in his brew,
and Heathcote, though obviously cut from the Winona Ryder cloth of giant-eyed
Burton ingénues (she even looks like the director’s corpse bride), is too
bland—when she seems to disappear from the movie near the end, it actually
takes a while for her absence to register.
There is probably also two too many scenes between Barnabas
and the modern-day Angelique, in which the vampire demands to be set free from
her lingering influence—Green’s gorgeous, wild-eyed succubus makes Glenn
Close’s Alex Forrest look, well, like Victoria Winters-- although we’re so glad
to see Depp and Green playing off each other (more about them in a second) that
they conjure a very forgiving mood.
Finally, inevitably, Dark Shadows, like many big-budget Hollywood movies that have come
before it and that will certainly arrive right on schedule in its wake, ends up
devolving into a special sort of mess, an effects free-for-all, once the
third-act warning bell sounds off. During this big, largely nonsensical climax
the movie begins to take on a whiff of panic, despite our delight in individual
touches and actor moments. (We’re especially ill-prepared for a last-minute
revelation involving one of the lead characters, one that makes emotional and
hormonal sense but seems to come, at least to this viewer, from some hidden,
little-used wing of Collinwood Manor, deeper evidence of which may be on the
cutting room floor.)
But overall, and strangely, the movie’s scattershot episodic
approach to its narrative, in which bits and pieces of several story notions
from the original series get compacted into a two-hour Hammer-infused cocktail,
ends up working in its favor as an offhanded tribute to the source material,
which was nothing if not often unfocused and usually conjured on the fly, and
certainly paper-thin in the budget department.
And about those glorious actor moments. Burton coaxes
terrific work from Jackie Earle Haley as Loomis (“It’s October. That’s why
there’s punkins.”); Michele Pfeiffer as the moody Collins family matriarch
(“But, Barnabas, in your own crazed, mixed-up sort of way, you saved the
family!”), though the filmmakers forget to make her character relevant in the
second half; Gulliver McGrath, who sells little David Collins’ parental anguish
without a trace of precociousness; Chloe Grace Moretz, who seethes memorably as
the disaffected Caroline in a way that will be familiar to parents of teenaged
daughters of any era; and especially Helena Bonham Carter, who does a great
fright-wigged, pill- and booze-ridden evocation of Grayson Hall’s would-be
immortal Dr. Julia Hoffman, who becomes seduced by the selfish possibilities in
guiding Barnabas to a cure for his eternal malady (“Every year I get half as
pretty and twice as drunk.”) Only Miller fails to make much of an impression,
and that has everything to do with the fact that the filmmakers haven’t
integrated Roger Collins very adeptly into the proceedings and nothing to do
with his capability as an actor.
Of course, this is Depp’s movie, and he brings to it his
characteristic, well-documented quirkiness, but also a surprising passion that
serves as a built-in rejoinder to those who might be at this point suspicious
of his penchant for the deliberately odd. Even after the increasingly
diminished returns of repeated visits to the Captain Jack Sparrow well, I can’t
think of another actor working right now (maybe Woody Harrelson) who so ably
combines as Depp does the magnetic qualities of a leading man with the hunger
to explore the strange nooks and crannies of character with such
attention-grabbing fierceness and, paradoxically, lack of the understandable
fear of looking foolish.
Depp’s Barnabas isn’t a stunt, nor is it just another
excuse to dress up in odd clothes and prosthetics for the Burtonesque fun of
it. He manages to embody the tension within a character who hasn’t yet
surrendered his moral imperative as a man to his supernatural compulsion to
kill, in vocal, physical (observe those claw-like bangs) and spiritual tribute
to Jonathan Frid, while at the same time keeping in tune with and alive to the
comedic tone of Burton’s homage. His blinkered confusion over the time in which
he has awakened (“A woman doctor! What an age is this!”) is far more sublime
than the joke-packed trailer could ever suggest. (And it also helps that we
don’t get exposed to practically all of those jokes in two and a half
minutes—the movie clocks in at just under two hours.) This is a glorious
performance, exhilarating in its capacity for romantic yearning and sheer
silliness, which deserves to spoken of in the same breath as Depp’s Raoul Duke,
his Willy Wonka and, yes, his Ed Wood.
But as much as Depp, the element that makes Dark Shadows really soar is the
breathtakingly funny work delivered by Eva
Green as Angelique, a witch who makes it her eternity’s mission to destroy
not only Barnabas but the fortunes of the entire Collins family because of the
200-year-old romantic slight over which she is still seething. Decked out in a
blonde wig that is closer to her natural hair color than the darker hue seen in
films like Casino Royale and The Dreamers, Green has the luscious
complexion and spectacular figure of a movie star, a femme fatale to whom most
men wouldn’t mind succumbing. She also has eyes that pop out of her skull in a
way that must have sent her groovy ghoulie director into paroxysms of pleasure,
and a mile-wide grin that stretches so sensually in its sinister insinuations
that the moniker “Sardonicus” might occasionally come to mind. Green’s must be
the best, most improbably grand mouth on a comedienne since the heyday of
Martha Raye, yet she’s also a classic, haunting beauty, one with, as it turns
out, killer comedic instincts. She mixes supernatural sensual entitlement and
erotic mystery with superbly weird and hilarious choices—at times she seems
literally drunk on both her power and her desire to possess Barnabas, and at
times she hits her overextended American accent (she’s French) too hard, which
has the effect of a hint at Angelique’s rage being barely contained, twisted
into shapes she can’t adequately express beneath the appearance of the cool, modern
businesswoman she’s constructed.
Confronting Barnabas, her steely, seductive gaze widens
slightly and suddenly we can witness the madness and the obsession inside-- we
know she’s no longer seeing her would-be amour or anyone else who happens to be
standing in front of her, but only the agonized tease of tortures and curses
perpetuated yet still unfulfilled. The logistics of Angelique’s supernatural
persona don’t tend to hold much water upon close examination—she’s a witch who
at some point along her journey through time has somehow become, literally, a
fatally beautiful mannequin—and she’s at the eye of the movie’s overwrought
climactic implosion. But it’s crucially wrong, even as subject to CGI as her
character eventually becomes, to proclaim that Green’s performance itself, in all
its devilishly comic glory, is ultimately reduced to a special effect. Her face
cracked like the most sublime eggshell, those burning eyes, the mouth twisted
into a final rictus of disappointment and outrage-- those features, which
remain to the end under the actress's intelligent control, tell the real story.
We tend to give plenty of credit to actors who conjure
mixtures of emotion, humor, pathos and grandeur, but only if they do it in a
proper, Oscar-friendly context of sweeping drama or epic biographical
exploration. Dark Shadows, on the
other hand, is on its gorgeously rendered surface an ostensibly inconsequential,
unapologetically entertaining movie, so it may take a few decades (hopefully
not centuries) for audiences to recognize the value of Green’s contribution,
and Depp’s. They serve as perfect compliments to a cracked director’s latest
love child, a swoony, silly, visually resplendent tribute to movies and
monsters that are thankfully, like the craving that drives Barnabas Collins
himself, still in his blood.
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