Continuing to mine the past for
subjects to dress up in frills, lace, and periwigs, the motion picture
industry, perhaps inevitably, has now dug up the 17th century poet, playwright,
and pornographer, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. (How’s that for the daily
press’s beloved local connection?)
Though probably not exactly a
familiar name these days, the profligate aristocrat and notorious voluptuary
offers some useful material for the cinema, even without all the period
costumes and attitudes. The particular period itself, the English Restoration,
in fact features enough violence, licentiousness, and political intrigue to
fill up a number of movies.
That Restoration refers to the return
of the monarchy to England
in the person of Charles II, after the Puritan Revolution and the Commonwealth
Interregnum of Oliver Cromwell, whose victorious forces beheaded the king’s
father, Charles I. The reopening of the theaters, after the repression of the
Puritans, and the general sense of release from constraint, inspired a kind of
comedy that depended heavily on awareness of social class, the behavior of high
society, sexual manipulation, and a brittle verbal wit. A number of playwrights
flourished under the new regime, including Rochester
(Johnny Depp), the libertine of the title, a personal favorite of the king
(John Malkovich), something of a rake himself, who fathered a number of
illegitimate children, in Dryden’s words, spreading his maker’s image through
the land.
In examining the character and his
brief, tempestuous life, the movie situates most of its action in the London
theater, where Rochester befriends
a young actress, Elizabeth Barry (Samantha Morton), whom he trains, according
to the script, in something like an early version of the Stanislavsky Method.
He forces her to rehearse endlessly, to find something of a character and an
emotion in herself, and to deliver her lines in a naturalistic manner. Aside
from that, the young aristocrat spends the rest of his time dashing off his
often obscene works in the accepted manner of the gentleman amateur, sneering
at everyone he encounters, and happily destroying his talent and his health in
colossal debauchery.
Despising those around him,
apparently including his wife and mother, contemptuous of rules and customs,
proud of his commitment to self destruction, Rochester
commands a small squad of aristocratic wits, including the playwright George
Etherege (Tom Hollander), who join him in dedicated dissipation. His friend the
king, who intermittently banishes him to his country estate and recalls him to London,
commissions Rochester to compose a
play for the visit of the French ambassador, whose own government Charles hopes
to tap for funds.
The climactic moment of the film
revolves around the performance of Rochester’s
play, a scandalous exercise in filth, a pageant of pornography featuring lewd
songs, nudity, simulated group copulation, a gigantic phallus wheeled in like a
cannon, and a veritable forest of dildos. King Charles, understandably,
expresses a certain disappointment with the work, which also disgusts the
ambassador, incidentally contradicting all those legends about the sexual
freedom of the French.
After that catastrophic offense to
the king, Rochester descends into a kind of concentrated self destruction,
wallowing in drunkenness and sensuality, willfully, perhaps desperately,
seeking some inexplicable immolation. Finally, dying of syphilis, that common
affliction of the time, he attains one last triumph, a speech in Parliament
defending his former friend and patron, King Charles.
Looking as if all its interiors were
filmed in candlelight, The Libertine conveys some sense of the gloom, filth, and squalor of Restoration England,
which nicely reflects the moral conditions of the time — the sun never shines
and the characters all walk ankle-deep in mud and knee-deep in decadence.
Despite that attention to the look and language of the era, the picture pretty
much settles on one central point, its protagonist’s reiterated, absolute
dedication to outrageousness of every kind, and stays there throughout.
Although the character of Rochester
adds to his often admirable list of unorthodox roles, Johnny Depp’s petulant
androgyny and layered mannerisms soon grow tedious — from start to finish,
nothing alters the patronizing tone, the constant obscenities, the languid
posture, the permanent sneer, ultimately making him, appropriately for the
picture, an entirely dull debauchee.
The Libertine (R), directed by
Laurence Dunmore, is playing at Pittsford Plaza Cinemas, Henrietta 18.
This article appears in Mar 15-21, 2006.
