the times | Thursday July 30 2020 1GT 5
arts
SAMIR HUSSEIN/JOHN SHEARER/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES; ALAMYflooded in (the movies have made
$4.5 billion at the box office), and
he became a blockbusting god and
global superstar.
In his private life, there was a
short-lived, youthful marriage to
Lori Anne Allison, three consecutive
engagements (to Jennifer Grey,
Sherilyn Fenn and Winona Ryder)
and a four-year relationship with Kate
Moss. These were followed by a stable,
14-year relationship with the French
actress and singer Vanessa Paradis
that produced two children. The
family were based in homes in Paris
and the south of France. Ryder and
Paradis, during the libel trial in
London, offered supportive statements
of Depp’s flawless and gentlemanly
conduct during their time with him.
Meanwhile, with the exception of his
sweetly restrained turn in Finding
Neverland, the film performances
generally became bigger and more
exaggerated (Willy Wonka in
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
the Mad Hatter in Alice in
Wonderland), and audiences
lapped them up. Until they didn’t.
The box-office death of his Venice-set
spy caper The Tourist, in 2010, was
ominous. That it became one of the
comedic linchpins of Ricky Gervais’s
Golden Globes monologue (“I’m
jumping on the bandwagon because
I haven’t even seen The Tourist. Who
has?”) and subjected Depp to
worldwide ridicule was a taste of
future humiliations.
The subsequent flops (Dark
Shadows, The Lone Ranger, Mortdecai)
brutally exposed the limitations of
Depp’s artistry, which seemed to rely
on heavy face-paint and a default
English accent that recalled classic-era
Charles Hawtrey. Pirates of the
Caribbean continued to pay the bills,
but even the tiresome adventures of
Jack Sparrow were running out of
steam. The poor fifth instalment,
released in 2017, underperformed
commercially.
Depp’s appearance in the Harry
Potter follow-up franchise Fantastic
Beasts was highly contentious. The
performance was autopilot Depp
(wacky make-up, zany accent —
this time David Bowie-lite), but
overshadowed by the emerging
domestic abuse allegations from
the Heard camp, which forced the
Potter and Beasts creator, JK Rowling,
to release an oddly ambiguous
statement about being “deeply
concerned” by certain issues, yet
sticking with Depp based on her
“understanding of the circumstances”.
Depp has since played some
low-key characters. He’ll next be seen,
for example, as the photojournalist
W Eugene Smith in the real-life
drama Minamata (I saw it at this
year’s Berlin Film Festival and was
underwhelmed). The unfortunate
truth is that Depp’s technical
inadequacies are undeniable. His outré
style, for which he became an icon,
has fallen out of favour, and he’s been
left floundering in an art form for
which he now seems ill equipped.
It’s no wonder that he needs a drink,
or wants to play pub guitar with some
ancient rockers. In a recent interview
he spoke about reflecting on his life
and his very recent travails while on
tour with the Hollywood Vampires.
“I kept trying to figure out what I’d
done to deserve this,” he said. “I’d
tried being kind to everyone, helping
everyone, being truthful to everyone.
The truth is most important to me.
And all this still happened.”director Tim Burton and bringing to
life DayGlo caricatures that relied
more on facial prosthetics and comical
vocal cadence than anything
approaching psychological realism.
Edward Scissorhands, Ichabod Crane
in Sleepy Hollow and even his version
of Raoul Duke in Terry Gilliam’s
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas were
examples of an overblown acting style
that came directly from kids’ cartoons
(Depp would later cite, straight-faced,
Wile E Coyote and Pepe Le Pew
as influences) and was seen at the
time as a popular novelty belonging
to Depp alone.
He did other non-cartoonish roles
too, but with less impact (Nick of
Time, Dead Man, The Ninth Gate).
I encountered him several times
around that time on the set of
Chocolat in 2000 (a friend worked
on the film) and observed someone
who was innately charismatic,
surprisingly elfin in stature and good
with a Zippo, and surrounded already
by sycophants. Depp arrived on the
first day of shooting and announced
that he would be delivering all the
lines of Roux, his French gypsy
character, in an Irish accent. No one
questioned it. No one even said: “But
Johnny, this makes no sense.” It was
simply star power quietly unbalanced.
He went full cartoon in 2003 with
his kiddie-friendly Keith Richards
homage, Jack Sparrow, in Pirates of the
Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.
Everything changed, the moneyDepp with his former
girlfriend Vanessa
Paradis in 2004him, he could buy his own paradise
island (Depp’s is in the Bahamas,
Brando’s was in French Polynesia).
There is one key difference between
the pair, however. And it may be at the
root of everything that’s happened
from the moment Depp slipped
accidentally on to the screen in the
mid-1980s until the last lurid
revelation of his recent libel case.
Marlon Brando, as an actor, was
a genius. Johnny Depp is not.
Watch him in his debut role in
1984, as slasher fodder Glen Lantz
in A Nightmare on Elm Street, and he’s
excruciatingly stiff. “Next time you’re
having a dream tell yourself it’s just a
dream and then you’ll wake right up,”
he says, blankly, to the heroine Nancy
Thompson (Heather Langenkamp).
He was not much better after this,
during four seasons of the undercover
cop show 21 Jump Street, where he
was consistently outperformed by
his softly coiffured mullet, his two
loopy earrings and the light coating
of bum fluff that clung nervously to
his upper lip.
It was around this time that he
appeared to formulate a career plan
and began railing against the idea of
doing vacuous work and being “turned
into a product”. He was briefly
effective in Arizona Dream and What’s
Eating Gilbert Grape (probably his best
performance), where he seemed
momentarily free and uncluttered. Yet
almost simultaneously he discovered
the kitsch pleasures of acting for theAt the same time Depp began
touring with his latest rock band, the
Hollywood Vampires (which includes
Alice Cooper and Joe Perry), decrying
his acting career and rewriting his
personal history as the accidental
slide of a serious musician into the
Hollywood limelight. When he met
the Times rock critic Will Hodgkinson
in Copenhagen in 2018, he said that
music had been “his life” all along, but
that by sheer chance, “the acting thing
started to happen” and he couldn’t
resist the allure of a pay cheque.
This is a variation of the usual Depp
schtick. His ultimate hero is Marlon
Brando, who had a similar disregard
for the acting profession. Depp likes
to repeat in interviews an anecdote
about how Thompson typed out The
Great Gatsby, word for word because
he wanted to know what it felt like to
write a masterpiece. It’s hard not to see
the parallels with Depp’s at times
slavish imitation of Brando.
Brando, like Depp, was uncommonly
beautiful, from small-town America
(Omaha, Nebraska, to Depp’s
Owensboro, Kentucky), with an
instinctive disregard for convention
and an often financially opportunistic
approach to screen acting — Brando’s
then eye-watering fee of $3.7 million
for two weeks of work on Superman
in 1978 has a touch of the big Pirates
money about it. Brando and Depp
worked together on the movies Don
Juan DeMarco and The Brave. Brando
even advised Depp on how, just likehero to box office zero
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