Macabre Indulgence (my thoughts on Dark Shadows)

I’m Tim Burton, and I have ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS! 

WHAT WILL I DO WITH IT??

Johnny Depp: Dude, let’s make a movie where I get to wear makeup and be fucking eccentric.

Tim Burton: Okay!

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Spoilers ahead!

No one can deny that Tim Burton films are fun romps through the land of Over the Top™. He’s got an eye for cinematic beauty, though in an admittedly non-traditional way. 

This film, like a lot of his recent fare, is definitely “fun,” and has some of the best and most seamless effects that I must assume were a combination of physical makeup effects and really top-notch CG. 

Tim Burton has amazing attention to most of the details in this film. It takes place in 1972, and every little detail in the town of Collinsport, Maine, the film’s setting, just screams “We’re in the 70s!”  I laughed out loud when they passed by the movie theatre of the town and it proclaimed DELIVERANCE: with Burt Reynolds! The costumes are so supremely well-done.  I hope that Michelle Pfeiffer got to keep her outfits and jewelry. I would have written it into my contract fo’ sho’. 

Of course Danny Elfman did the music, but they’ve also clearly paid a LOT for the soundtrack, which is AMAZING! I wouldn’t be surprised if the music budget alone was $3M, but, like Mad Men’s usage of “Lady Lazarus,” the money was well-spent.

There were some funny jokes in the film, too, but if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen them all. And that ends up being the problem: the funny bits are too far spaced, and the REST of the film doesn’t really compel you to care. It’s just a whole lot of “Check this awesome beautiful macabre stuff”

There’s such a fine line to traverse when you’re making a Dark Comedy. It helps if you’re like Burton and you prefer the campy brand of humor, but the darkness can’t be too dark and you don’t want it to feel too light-hearted and it just ends up needing something MORE than darkness or comedy.

And that’s where this movie falls short, and honestly ends up feeling like a season of True Blood. They keep adding MORE OUTRAGEOUS STUFF, and it IS, I’ll reiterate, really well executed. But when I say a Dark Comedy needs something “more” this kind of “more” is NOT what I’m talking about.

The things I loved about movies like Edward Scissorhands, or Nightmare Before Christmas, were that, underneath all the flash, there was this tender, beautiful beating heart that just begged you to cradle it and care for it as though it was your own.

This movie creates its own perfect analogy when, at the end of the film, Angelique pulls from inside her porcelain chest  a flashing, pink Disco heart and watches it slowly stop beating. 

This movie didn’t have a real heart either: it had a flashing pink disco heart. And without real heart, the sentiment I got as I sat and watched the credits roll is that the movie just felt…expensive. Expensive and indulgent.

I’m glad that Johnny Depp and Tim Burton are friends. I’m glad that they collaborate together, but when a film like this comes out that doesn’t seem to push either one of them to do ANYTHING NEW, I wonder which one of them is responsible for this big-budget reach-around. 

If you’re going to pull out old material like Dark Shadows, don’t just make it with better effects and call it a day. I described it as such via text after the film last night:

“It’s like they just pulled a CG rabbit out of an old tattered hat.”

It was visibly rife with excess.  Every female character was not JUST wearing false eyelashes, they were wearing TWO FOOT LONG false eyelashes.

The costumes were not just 1970’s: they were REMEMBER THE BRIGHT BOLDNESS OF THE 1970s!?!?

The supernatural was IN. YO. FACE. Do you like SPOOKY SHIT? How about some Vampires?! No WAIT! ALSO GHOSTS! No WAAIT WAIIIT! SUCCUBI! What about THEM!? Are we done!? NO! WEREWOLVES! It’s seriously the True Blood philosophy of television.

There is even a ridiculous Supernatural Sex Scene. It was like real-life Jamaican Daggering sex. Up on dee walls! Higher! BALANCE!!

This kind of excess works for the CG. It lends the kind of creativity that you crave, the chase for the Most Imaginative Idea. The finale sequence with Angelique’s porcelain skin is absolutely stunning. AMAZINGLY done. 

But there comes a point where you might as well just make wallpaper out of $100 bills, and you’ve done so much other crazy shit, and it you could always use it to justify your huge-ass budget.

Funnily, the ONE thing that seemed a bit shoddy was Depp’s makeup.  I mean, I felt like they’d pulled the same pancake makeup kit out of the box from the set of Edward Scissorhands and just used that, and poor Johnny Depp just ended up looking like Brent Spiner.  If I’d wanted to I could have colonized the pores on his face.

Yes, you can simulate cheekbones by airbrushing, but there are issues of lighting and the age of the face, and sometimes Depp just looked SLOPPY.  Enough that it was distracting. [See: Hippie Fire Circle Scene]

I liked the casting overall. I don’t know what kind of marriage Burton & Helena Bonham Carter have (I know they live in separate houses) but he clearly loves her enough to give her interesting roles to play.

Of course she likes playing quirky, but in this film she didn’t look like the embodiment of a hairy tornado and her character was interesting. Despite her proclivities toward the eccentric, she can actually act.

I love Jonny Lee Miller, but he felt underused and also predictable.

I’m enjoying this post-Stardust revival of Michelle Pfeiffer’s career, too. 

I expect we’ll be seeing a lot more of the two ingenues, “Victoria” and “Carolyn” - played by Bella Heathcote & Chloë Grace Moretz.  They’re just those kind of girls.

Yet I cannot help but stress that I was just not taken in by Burton’s artistic trickery this time.  I need more from a film than a spooky hot Johnny Depp and some special effects. As the price of movies goes up and up, I want to have a movie do more than just keep me from falling asleep for 2 hours. I’d love it to shed light on some corner of my mind that may have been dark, or make me think about something in a new way. I have imagination of my own, so I want to perhaps see NEW things when I peer into someone else’s imagination. 

I could have told you how this film ended 20 minutes into it. You hope in the beginning of a film that this won’t be true, and that the director will surprise you, because it does happen a lot! Just…not here.

There are plenty of ladies (and men) who are more than content to let the non-vampire version of Johnny Depp wiggle his fingers at them and hypnotize them into submission. 

Or people who go to see any Tim Burton film because they just Love Him Unconditionally and love their Jack Skellington hairbows from Hot Topic.

The fact is, all the people who are tired of seeing and hearing about The Avengers will go and see this film, and indulge Tim Burton a little bit more.

And, he has so much money and power, he can pretty much do anything he wants. I’ll just hope that he wants to do something new and interesting the next go-round.