The Screen Addict Devilish Depp

I’ve adored Johnny Depp ever since 21 Jump Street became part of my weekly cable-tv diet during the late Eighties. The Hollywood Vampires guitarist elevated to one of my all-time heroes however, when I first saw Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) almost a decade later.

In my not-so-humble opinion, there has never been a greater match between source material and filmmakers than Terry Gilliam’s big-screen adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s groundbreaking novel. Gilliam’s casting of Depp and Benicio Del Toro as Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo is the proverbial icing on the cake – it is, as far as I am concerned, a perfect film.

Gilliam and Depp apparently formed a bond that stretched far beyond FaLiLV as well. When Heath Ledger passed away in the middle of shooting Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (2009), Depp was one of the actors who stepped in to complete Ledger’s scenes. In the fantastic documentary For No Good Reason (2012) about legendary artist Ralph Steadman, both Gilliam and Depp show up extensively to pay tribute to the Fear and Loathing illustrator. And as I’m writing this piece, Variety reports that Gilliam wants Depp to play Satan in his new film Carnival at the End of Days…

How’s that for an enduring friendship.

The Nineties in particular were an exceptional decennium for Depp, with career-defining performances in classics like What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993), Ed Wood (1994) and Donnie Brasco (1997). His stellar output notwithstanding, I still suffered a couple of inexplicable blind spots in Depp’s filmography for the longest time. The Ninth Gate (1999) and The Astronaut’s Wife (1999), two films the actor made back-to-back on the brink of the new millennium, somehow completely escaped my attention.

Obviously, I corrected those mistakes recently, and am here to report on it.

Several blogs back, I wrote about my (very) brief acting career (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-adrien-brody-hijacked-my-hollywood-hopes-robin-logjes-78y2e/?trackingId=YlgdlCYATeurKxLy25%2B1dQ%3D%3D) in which Roman Polanski was a key figure. Coincidentally, the film Polanski made prior to the one I auditioned for, was TNG. This actually makes me feel slightly less bad about losing out on the part of Wladyslaw Szpilman. After all, Depp is a pretty tough act to follow…

All kidding aside – after finally watching it, my conclusion is that TNG is pretty great. Sure, the film has some charming flaws – which I will address later – but I don’t really get why it was so resolutely panned when it came out. I am obviously also quite aware of the decades-old controversies around Polanski. I have however always been, and will always be adamant in my opinion that we should try to separate the artist from the individual. Bad men, whether you like it or not, sometimes do make great art.

TNG follows Dean Corso (Depp), a rare-books dealer who is hired by the mysterious collector Boris Balkan (Frank Langella) to track down a demonic scripture. Plenty of recognizable faces fill out the rest of the cast, James Russo, Emmanuelle Seigner and Lena Olin amongst them.

The film of course quite obviously shares a theme with Polanski’s Sixties-masterpiece Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Mysticism and The Antichrist have always lingered in the background throughout the director’s oeuvre, and one can’t help but wonder how Polanski was affected creatively when pure evil actually entered his personal life in the shape of The Manson Family. I am amazed that the filmmaker was still interested in making something as dark as TNG at all, after the horrific events of August 9th, 1969.

TNG shares a lot of visual cues with another supernaturally-themed Thriller that was released two years earlier – The Devil’s Advocate (1997). Langella’s scenes almost exactly mirror those of Al Pacino in TDA, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.

More distracting are the glaringly obvious sets that were built to mimic New York. Polanski doesn’t want to shoot in the U.S. following his guilty plea to unlawful intercourse with a minor, so any scene that takes place in The States has to be recreated wherever in Europe the director is filming. That’s less problematic when shooting, for instance, Balkan’s office overlooking the New York skyline, but the exterior shots look terribly dated for a film that is barely 25 years old. Not even the superb cinematography of Darius Khondji – Seven (1995), Panic Room (2002) – can remedy that.

Action sequences are not Polanski’s strong suit, and you can tell the director is uncomfortable with a scene that involves, for example, a car chase. Yes, yes – I get that the blood-red Dodge Viper symbolizes Satan, it’s very clever, but a strong visual metaphor like that desperately needs a more flamboyant filmmaker.

Still, TNG delivers where it counts – creepiness. Langella, Seigner and Olin are all deliciously unsettling, ostensibly without really trying to be. This is where we clearly recognize the master-filmmaker that is Roman Polanski.

The director is a huge part of why I choose to see a film, and I had never heard of Rand Ravich before. TAW was Ravich’ feature-film debut as writer-director, and he managed to snare the red-hot Depp and Charlize Theron for his project. Curiously, aside from a producing gig on Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002), there hasn’t been a lot of noise around the filmmaker since. This is probably why TAW slipped through the cracks of my awareness twenty years ago, and hadn’t really been back on my radar until I decided to give it a go last week.

TAW centers on Spencer Armacost (Depp), an astronaut who returns from space not quite the same man after his space shuttle suffers a mysterious malfunction.

Surprisingly, TAW makes for a pretty spot-on companion piece to both TNG and RB. The evil that takes hold of Armacost is never explicitly defined (Alien? Satan? Alien Satan?) but Polanski’s 1968 Horror-classic clearly was the template for Ravich’ film. And like TNG, TAW too shares tons of visual references and story beats with TDA, not in the least because of Charlize Theron, who plays strikingly similar parts in TAW and TDA. Theron’s Jillian Armacost even follows her career-driven husband from Florida to New York, exactly like Kevin and Marry Ann Lomax in TDA.

I like the quasi low-budget approach of TAW. Everything space-shuttle related happens mostly off screen – save for one rickety, and frankly unnecessary CGI sequence – and is relayed through dialogue. The meat of this film is more in the excellent performances and the way Ravich carefully stages tension. For someone who hadn’t had a whole lot of directing experience before this film, it sure looks like the guy knew what he was doing.

So, there you have it. I set out to write a piece about catching up on two Depp titles that had escaped my attention, but it turned into a reflection on The Antichrist.

I guess The Devil is really attractive…

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