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Depp
Thoughts
Johnny
Depp is an
American Original
By
Erik Lundegaard
MSNBC.com
July
31, 2006
Actor
refuses to follow familiar formulas; instead he’s carved his
own
path.
Johnny Depp’s experience
with the first
Pirates of the Caribbean movie is a
good primer in the inevitable conflicts between artist and businessman.
The artist desires originality. What
hasn’t been done before? The businessman desires repetition.
What has been
successful before? 
Businessmen
fret over originality because they
can’t predict
its outcome—or, more accurately, pretend to predict its
outcome, since their
predictions are always suspect at best. Seinfeld,
after all, bombed before focus groups. Bottle
Rocket received the lowest focus-group numbers in its
studio’s history.
Focus groups are the enablers of studio executives in this way. What’s
this
thing? say focus groups. I’ve never seen
anything like this before. It
must not be any good.
For Pirates,
Disney executives imagined Capt. Jack Sparrow as a gleaming-teethed
swashbuckler, a Burt Lancaster type, something that had worked before.
Instead
Depp gave them a pirate who was touched, tippled, fey and vain. He
wobbled. He
wore mascara. He was comic. He was original. He was, according to Depp,
a
combination of Keith Richards and Pepe Le Pew.
Disney executives famously objected.
I’m sure there were discussions of branding
and cross-promotion
and synergy. Pirates
wasn’t
just a movie, after all, it was one of the most popular rides at Disney
theme
parks around the world. It was already a brand. If the film bombed, it
might
ruin the brand. They might have to close the rides.
They did. Thanks in large part to
Depp’s comic performance, the film proved so
popular—making over $650 million
worldwide—that Disney temporarily closed the rides to include
likenesses of
Capt. Jack and other characters from the film. The ride inspired the
movie
which inspired the ride. Synergy.
Result: Depp was honored for his
artistry—a
rare Oscar nomination for a comic performance—while the
businessmen counted the
loot. Those same businessmen are now paying through the nose so Depp
can repeat
the performance they initially feared; so Depp can repeat his
originality. Find
the irony where you will.
Ain’t
pretty no more
Johnny Depp has been an original for
much of his career. The purpose of the movie star is to appear cool and
good-looking onscreen. Depp, cool and good-looking in real life, goes
out of
his way to appear geeky and freaky onscreen. He hides his pretty face.
He is
Jake La Motta to his own Tony Janiro. Ain’t pretty
no more.
He became a TV star on 21
Jump Street but chafed under the
teen-idol image, and was mocked and maligned for it. Didn’t
he have fame? Good
looks? Why is he running from what we all want? Since most of us
compromise for
a middle-class paycheck, we couldn’t understand someone who
wouldn’t compromise
for a world-class paycheck and all the perks that went with it
(Sherilyn Fenn,
Kate Moss, Winona Ryder). Sure, it’s a cartoon
version of you, but more
people see it. Less you, more them. What’s
the problem?
So he fled his teen-idol image . . .
by
playing a teen idol in John Waters’ film Cry-Baby.
Waters also cast Tracy Lords, who was trying to flee her porn queen
past, as a
bad girl. Waters knows. 
Make
fun of your image, and, as he says in the
director’s commentary, “they can never use it
against you again.” Depp, in a
1990 interview, said more-or-less the same. “It was a chance
to make fun of the
image that had been shoved down America’s throats by the
company I worked for,”
he said. The role also helped introduce him to Tim Burton, with whom he
would
make five films. And counting.
He went on to play characters who
battle with reality. They are often confused men trying to make sense
of a
harsh reality (Edward Scissorhands, What’s
Eating Gilbert Grape, Dead Man, Sleepy
Hollow) or crazed men who suck others into their fantasy (Ed Wood, Don
Juan DeMarco, Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas). In Benny
& Joon, Joon (Mary Stuart Masterson) first sees the
silent film-loving
Sam (Depp) perched in a tree. The second time she sees him, after
winning him
(by losing) in a card game, she says, matter-of-factly,
“You’re out of your
tree.” He pauses, shrugs, and responds matter-of-factly,
“It’s not my tree.”
That sums up many of Johnny
Depp’s
early characters. They’re out of their tree, but
it’s not their tree.
Too
delicate to live
These characters often seem too
delicate to live. They tend to be passive, particularly with women. His
Edward
is frozen before Winona Ryder’s beauty, his Gilbert a boy-toy
to Mary
Steenburgen. In the same film it’s Juliette Lewis who finally
makes the first
move. Even Depp’s Don Juan forces himself on no one.
“I give women pleasure, if
they desire,” he says. 
That’s
why his Roux, the
gypsy in Chocolat (2000), comes as
something of a shock. He actually flirts
with Juliette Binoche’s Vianne. He’s actually bold.
As she walks away, he
checks her out. “I’ll come around
sometime,” he says, grinning, “get that
squeak out of your door.” The grin broadens. Women everywhere
fanned
themselves.
His characters are sometimes so
reserved that they risk being non-entities. “Johnny played
the part straight
and flat,” Roman Polanski says of Depp’s Dean Corso
in The Ninth Gate. “An
interesting contrast with all those strange and
funny secondary characters.” As a result Depp often found
himself upstaged: by
Leonardo DiCaprio’s mentally-handicapped kid brother in Gilbert Grape, by Al Pacino’s
sad mobster in Donnie Brasco, by
Benicio del Toro’s whacked-out lawyer in Fear
and Loathing. It was his co-stars
who got the Oscar noms: Leo for Gilbert,
Martin Landau for Ed Wood, Juliette
Binoche and Judi Dench in Chocolat.
Now he’s doing the
upstaging; now he’s
getting the Oscar noms. Maybe it helps that he’s not the
central character.
Maybe having the focus elsewhere frees him in some way. Pirates
is a love story between Keira Knightly and Orlando Bloom, Once
Upon a Time in Mexico is a revenge
story for Antonio Banderas. Depp’s character in both films is
the wild card who
sets everything in motion. Outrageous, unpredictable, funny: the guy we
remember. The guy who makes watching the movie worthwhile. You gotta
love an
undercover CIA agent who wears a T-shirt that says
“CIA” to a bullfight.
Many of his early movies were indies,
and none made much money. 1990’s Edward
Scissorhands topped $50 million, a number a Johnny Depp movie
wouldn’t see
again until 1999’s Sleepy Hollow
(which topped $100 million). Most floundered below $25 million. Going
mainstream
didn’t help. The action film Nick
of Time
(1995) made just $8 million. The sci-fi thriller, The
Astronaut’s Wife (1999), made just $10 million.
Both films had
the additional problem of sucking.
Indeed, the pleasant surprise of
watching the early Johnny Depp movies again is how many of them hold
up. Cry-Baby is a rock
’n’ roll gas, Edward
Scissorhands is a touching metaphor
for hurting those we love, Gilbert Grape
a bittersweet battle between too-little freedom and too-much
responsibility.
Want a short valentine full of beautiful language? Don Juan
DeMarco. A paean to bad taste over corporate taste? Ed
Wood. A gritty drama on loyalty which
warns—like Kurt Vonnegut in Mother
Night—to
be careful what you pretend to be, because you are what you pretend to
be? Donnie Brasco.
More recent films are good but lack
something. Fear and Loathing is a
helluva trip, but it’s someone else’s trip, and
people on drugs rarely make
interesting protagonists. The ending to The
Ninth Gate is thin. Blow,
already
derivative of Goodfellas, suffers
from the second-half passivity of Depp’s initial Boston tough
guy. Once Upon a Time is too much
style and
not enough substance. Secret Window
is too easy to figure out.
Depp is great in all of them.
Out
of his tree
Pirates of
the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest is Depp’s first sequel,
and, like most
sequels, it’s bigger, louder and longer than the first. The
set pieces are
overwhelming. 
Everything
is broader, including the comedy. That might
not be a
good thing.
Maybe the first film worked so well
because
Capt. Jack was written as a non-comic character and found himself in
non-comic
situations. Depp’s tottering performance simply made it all
funny. Now that the
writers know what they got, they’ve stuck him in comic
situations. Being chased
by cannibals, for example. Although, I have to admit, Capt.
Jack’s head-back,
feet-first running style, so reminiscent of a cartoon, is worth the
price of
admission.
-- Photos added by Zone editors