.MOVIE LISTINGS | MOVIE REVIEW ARCHIVE | THEATER INFO Mind Over Mud Imagining John Wilmot's wit and debauchery BY MOLLY TEMPLETON THE LIBERTINE: Directed by Laurence Dunmore. Written by Stephen Jeffreys, based on his play. Produced by John Malkovich, Lianne Halfon, Russell Smith. Executive produced by Chase Bailey, Steve Christian, Marc Samuelson, Peter Samuelson. Cinematography, Alexander Melman. Editor, Jill Bilcock. Music, Michael Nyman. Production design, Ben van Os. Costume design, Dien Van Straalin. Starring Johnny Depp, Samantha Morton and John Malkovich, with Rosamund Pike, Kelly Reilly, and Richard Coyle. The Weinstein Company, 2005. R. 114 minutes. As King Charles II (John Malkovich) says to John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester (Johnny Depp), "It's fun to be against things." It's tempting to be against The Libertine, a muddled, dark adaptation by Stephen Jeffreys of his play of the same name. Depp's Wilmot even suggests it's expected: "You will not like me," he sneers at the camera, his face, almost luminous in candlelight, framed purposefully by the shaggy hair of an '80s rock star. It's not that The Libertine is truly unlikable. It's just that finding things to like under the movie's patchwork plot and wheezy, indistinct morality may take more effort than it's worth. Wilmot, at the start of the film, has been summoned back to Charles' court, from which he was banished for a clever, lewd bit of poetry three months earlier. Despite Wilmot's obvious preference for satire and sex over pleasing the crown, Charles wants a great work from him. "Elizabeth had her Shakespeare," Malkovich, in a large prosthetic nose, says loftily to Wilmot. "You can be mine." But more often than he writes, Wilmot traipses about London, playing the part of a drunken poet nobleman with gusto though his heart doesn't seem to be truly in it. At a playhouse one night, he sees Elizabeth Barry (Samantha Morton), whose spirit strikes him despite her poor performance. In a moment of Pygmalion-ism, Wilmot bets his friends he can swiftly turn Barry into the most celebrated actress on the London stage. Though his intentions seem honorable at first, they unsurprisingly start an affair. Even a cursory bit of research shows the real Wilmot led a fascinating life, but Jeffreys and first-time film director Laurence Dunmore seem so dazzled by the Earl's wit and level of debauchery that they forget about both storyline and context. Wilmot, according to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, was "one of the most original and powerful English satirists," yet here he seems just a self-destructive man-child, a prototype for the indulgent starlets of today. Offering no sense of the English court or cultural landscape, The Libertine often feels like a character sketch that took "sketch" a bit too literally. Depp, of course, does what he can with the material, and without him The Libertine would be a lesser movie. A masterful rogue — coy, tart, angry, more often than not drunk — his Wilmot is downright painful to look at by the end, his flesh betraying him in every way. Likewise, Samantha Morton makes the most of her sometimes flimsy role as Wilmot's project and lover. Under her warm face and overflowing eyes is a fierce ambition Wilmot cannot seem to see. For anyone tired of brightly lit, unbelievably clean period pieces, the film is also likeably dirty and dark, from the mud-covered boards on which Wilmot strolls London's streets to the ink and dirt that permanently mar his fingers. As Wilmot succumbs to his syphilitic fate, The Libertine's limited appeal wanes too. The off-putting end seems to suggest Wilmot lived his life the wrong way all along, and would have been happier if he'd used his pen in support of king and country. The real Wilmot is said to have experienced a religious conversion on his deathbed, renouncing his past, but to make a tidy moral of his colorful life seems hardly just. Especially as the one indelible image of The Libertine is a scene from Wilmot's own work: the play mocking Charles and his court, absurdly and uproariously staged, effective and provocative. Wilmot's art, rather than this muddy depiction of his life, sticks in the mind.
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