Where Johnny Depp’s Career Is Now

 

by Gabriel Valdez

Is Johnny Depp still Johnny Depp? Did everything he touch once turn to artistic gold, and has he lost that now? Has he sold out? This reaction is to an argument I’ve heard many times, but was most recently written up by Stephanie Merry’s Washington Post article “What happened to Johnny Depp? How ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ made him, and ruined him.”

You can read her article or go straight on, because I’m sure you’ve heard the Johnny Depp argument before – he’s sold out. He sucks now. He broke your heart.

I haven’t seen Mortdecai, but even if it is the worst piece of schlock ever made, it wouldn’t be the first time Depp makes it. The argument is that he’s making worse films now than he used to, and he’s relying on bigger budgets to do so. One of those things is true.

Let’s make one thing clear: any successful artist is going to start getting more money eventually. This does not equate to selling out. Nor does praising Depp for sticking by Tim Burton’s side when Burton could do no wrong, and shellacking Depp for Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Dark Shadows. Either Depp deserves credit for sticking by Burton, or criticism for it. If Depp stopped supporting Burton once Burton’s career fell off, that would be selling out.

People are also quick to criticize The Lone Ranger, but if you look at how the Native American and other minority communities reacted to the messages inside the film, you might begin to look at it a little differently. Read my review for one take on how The Lone Ranger uses sight gags and film references to present and criticize America’s long history of genocide.

No one bothers to mention Rango either. It’s animated, critics, say. It doesn’t really count. These same critics will fight tooth-and-nail for Andy Serkis to get nominated for his motion capture performances in The Lord of the Rings and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. But Rango, which is a fully motion-captured film, doesn’t count because it’s animated. That’s some logic for you.

No one bothers to mention how Depp and other actors stepped in, after the death of Heath Ledger, to help Terry Gilliam finish The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

Depp is further blamed for the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, which he was once lauded for. So, his performance is still good, we’re just upset there’s too much of it? I get that people don’t like sequels – except for all the sequels that they like – and think they’re some new evil we’ve never faced before (the first American sequel that was a true event movie was 1916’s The Fall of a Nation, and that was before we got to making 80,000 Sherlock Holmes movies). But, whatever, fine, sequels are evil, and every actor who’s ever participated in one has sold out. And everyone from Homer to Arthur Conan Doyle should be strung up for making the concept viable before film was even invented. Have fun watching that paint dry.

Seriously, do the same critics who go gaga for every new Marvel trailer really want to tell me about how Depp has sold out? We’re employing some very different standards here. I’ve given you the insane logic that Depp’s sticking by Burton is “selling out,” I’ve taken The Lone Ranger out of the equation, I’ll even remove Rango and Doctor Parnassus for you. Public Enemies wasn’t great, but Depp was very good in it. Screw it, let’s take that out, too.

So we take everything out and the argument is still that Depp has sold out because now he participates in sequels. He shouldn’t be able to. Even though everyone else does. As long as we’re consistent and decide we hate Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson, Chris Hemsworth and Robert Downey Jr, that The Empire Strikes Back and The Godfather: Part II are abominations that should never have been. Aliens, Lord of the Rings, Toy Story 2 and 3, chuck it all in the trash. You know what, if you’re that consistent, you win. I concede the argument.

If you’re not, then what are we even talking about?

Look, Depp used to make as many bad movies as good. Nick of Time. The Brave. Secret Window. The Man Who Cried. The Astronaut’s Wife. Fricking The Ninth Gate.

Seriously, have you tried watching The Ninth Gate? Don’t. Just don’t. Or do, because then it’ll completely make my point.

But Depp’s more ridiculous now than he used to be! He overacts!

Really? Have you seen Once Upon a Time in Mexico? Cause his eyes get gouged out at one point and if you’ve lasted until then, you’ll understand the feeling.

Johnny Depp hasn’t changed. His core as an artist hasn’t turned on its head. He’s not being lazy. He’s not more prone to flops than he was before. Producers are simply putting more money into his projects, and when they don’t turn out now, people notice because they cost more. That’s it.

Nobody notices or cares when a Lawrence Dunmore project flops. They do when a Gore Verbinski movie does. I’m hardly a fan of every modern Johnny Depp role. But if you look closely, you’ll probably find you’re not a fan of every Johnny Depp role from the 90s either.

Who Did the Golden Globes Forget?

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association and the Golden Globes for which they vote have a very specific taste in film, and awards shows aren’t complete without oversights – there are only so many nominations to go around.

Awards ceremonies tend to ignore genre film far too much, only acknowledging it when it comes in foreign language or animated form. For every Pan’s Labyrinth we catch, there is a Moon we ignore. For every Spirited Away we rightly laud, we neglect something like The Fall.

Actors who have been nominated before gain a sort of tenure that can only be broken by the most dramatic, momentous, newsworthy roles. That means there’s a high bar for entry, but a comparatively lower bar for re-nomination.

The Golden Globes also lack technical categories like costume design and cinematography. Keeping all this in mind:

Who did the Golden Globes miss?

BEST MOTION PICTURE, DRAMA

Nominated: 12 Years a Slave, Captain Phillips, Gravity, Philomena, Rush

Forgotten: Prisoners

The biggest awards oversight of the year is also the best mystery of the year. Concerning the disappearance of two little girls, Prisoners is brimming with red herrings and great performances. Its left turns work because all the clues you need are there from the beginning.

It contains tremendous questions about faith and morality and pulls a unique trick at the end, not just putting its viewers in the position of judging whether one protagonist is redeemed or damned, but in making it clear that we’re not qualified to be his judges.

It contains stirring performances by Maria Bello, Paul Dano, Viola Davis, Jake Gyllenhaal, Terrence Howard, Hugh Jackman, and Melissa Leo.

BEST ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE, DRAMA

Nominated: Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine); Sandra Bullock (Gravity); Judi Dench (Philomena); Emma Thompson (Saving Mr. Banks); Kate Winslet (Labor Day)

Forgotten: Jennifer Lawrence, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Actresses in action movies never get awards recognition. Sigourney Weaver’s acknowledgment for Aliens a full 27 years ago stands out as the lone exception. Jennifer Lawrence’s translation of Katniss Everdeen for the big screen realizes not just an action hero’s story but also that of a psychologically breaking soldier whose image is manipulated for publicity and who is both fearful of and deeply resigned to the inevitability of being sent back into battle. It’s a timely portrayal in a deceptively important film that few actors – male or female – could fuse into a single, living, breathing character.

BEST ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE, DRAMA

Nominated: Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave); Idris Elba (Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom); Tom Hanks (Captain Phillips); Matthew McConaughey (Dallas Buyers Club); Robert Redford (All is Lost)

Forgotten: Jake Gyllenhaal, Prisoners

Though Hugh Jackman has the showier role as a father searching for his missing daughter, Gyllenhaal provides the film’s moral anchor as Detective Loki. Combating the mystery in front of him as well as finding a kidnapped suspect and working his way around a police chief who speaks in deeply bureaucratic half-truths, Loki is a character realized as much in the steady performance of a grueling job as in his flaws and ever-present, nervous tics. He is the only patient man in a universe of dread. Confronting grieving parents, suspects, and deceptive bosses, what makes Loki special is the reserve Gyllenhaal gives him.

Loki is a character whose tendency to respond in measured doses feels so deeply ingrained that it doesn’t feel like you’re witnessing dramatic acting so much as habits practiced over a lifetime. That reserve, that measured reaction is constantly assaulted. Sometimes it holds and sometimes it breaks, but you can tell exactly where the line is every second Gyllenhaal is on-screen. It’s an understated performance that makes the film’s drama and mystery feel very real, and it’s the best work Gyllenhaal has done to date.

BEST MOTION PICTURE, MUSICAL OR COMEDY

Nominated: American Hustle, Her, Inside Llewyn Davis, Nebraska, The Wolf of Wall Street

Forgotten: Spring Breakers

It’s neither a musical nor a comedy, but that’s OK – neither are more than half the films the Globes nominated in this category. Spring Breakers would be a cutting satire if it undermined its subject matter of drunk, college kids at Spring Break and the culture of criminality that appeals to their rebellious side.

Instead, it belongs to a forgotten genre called absurdism. It seeks to empathize with characters that steal and terrorize, but not to justify their actions or give us tragic, movie villains who unsuspectingly travel along some downward spiral. As the blog Agents and Seers puts it, Spring Breakers presents in James Franco’s drug dealer, Alien, a character who embraces “enlightened false consciousness,” for whom “money, wealth, and excess is an end in itself rather than a means.”

Whether she succeeds or fails as a dramatic actress, Selena Gomez already has a truly important performance under her belt as Faith, the Alice down the rabbit hole, “an idealistically unaware character in an otherwise cynically aware culture of crime and materialism.”

Spring Breakers was written and directed by Harmony Korine, who wrote the screenplay for the similarly conscience-scathing, reality-breaking film about a boy spreading AIDS, Kids.

BEST ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE, MUSICAL OR COMEDY

Nominated: Amy Adams (American Hustle); Julie Delpy (Before Midnight); Greta Gerwig (Frances Ha); Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Enough Said); Meryl Streep (August: Osage County)

Forgotten: Michelle Pfeiffer, The Family

Sometimes a film that has everything going for it just doesn’t work in the end, and no film this year exhibits this better than The Family. Just as stellar performances in genre films are overlooked, stellar performances in average films are easily forgotten. No matter how much the film’s blow-everything-up ending undermines the family dynamics that precede it, Pfeiffer’s work as Maggie Blake, a mob wife living in France under the witness protection program, makes her parts of the film glow.

She handles the comedy deftly, creates a believable and warm family dynamic with Robert de Niro, and – when the mobsters inevitably show up and her children go missing – she delivers one of the best scenes of the year. She makes a mediocre film worth seeing for her performance alone.

BEST ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE, MUSICAL OR COMEDY

Nominated: Christian Bale (American Hustle); Bruce Dern (Nebraska); Leonardo DiCaprio (The Wolf of Wall Street); Oscar Isaac (Inside Llewyn Davis); Joaquin Phoenix (Her)

Forgotten: Johnny Depp, The Lone Ranger

I was ready to dislike Depp in this movie. I feared a Native American version of Stepin Fetchit, but The Lone Ranger is whole-heartedly on the Native American side of the argument. For the most part, Depp takes a back seat, subduing what could easily have been an over-the-top, mugging role while allowing Armie Hammer’s Lone Ranger to be the larger-than-life character. His performance here is no rehash of Captain Jack Sparrow, no matter how much the ads would like you to believe otherwise.

Depp channels Buster Keaton more than at any other point in his career by playing the physical comedy with stoic reservation, while allowing director Gore Verbinski to get away with playing fast and loose with monumental shifts in tone. There’s an audience resistance to Johnny Depp born out of the idea that he’s spent too long cashing in on his indie cred, but with The Lone Ranger, he’s taken a blockbuster film and infused it with that energy – both in his performance and in the film’s deeply bittersweet message about ethnic bloodshed being part of America’s military industrial DNA since the beginning.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE

Nominated: Sally Hawkins (Blue Jasmine); Jennifer Lawrence (American Hustle); Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years a Slave); Julia Roberts (August: Osage County); June Squibb (Nebraska)

Forgotten: Andrea Riseborough, Oblivion

Oblivion, like Prisoners, is a complicated and overlooked gem of a film. It takes its cues from Golden Age science-fiction like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey all the way through to modern, anti-corporate parables such as Duncan Jones’s Moon.

Andrea Riseborough plays Victoria, who lives in the science-fiction equivalent of a white ivory tower in the clouds. She acts as the liaison between Tom Cruise’s drone repairman Jack and an orbiting base that helps transport refugees from a war-ravaged Earth to a colony on Saturn’s moon Titan.

Oblivion is a film that hides realities behind realities, and Victoria is the slippery glue that holds it all together. As each truth is peeled back to reveal something new, we’re never quite sure how much Victoria does or doesn’t know, whether she suspects and hides the truth from Jack or if she’s willfully in the dark. Oblivion demands a character who is controlling, quietly forceful, and constantly thinking, yet who is reliable, genuine, and caring, who is an awkward middle man between demanding boss and troublesome employee, who you trust and root for and don’t want to see hurt despite her perspective on reality being too slippery to even remotely pin down. We trust her even as we grow more and more suspicious of her.

It’s a thankless role in an underseen science-fiction masterpiece, and a role that you never seem to read the same way from viewing to viewing.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE

Nominated: Barkhad Abdi (Captain Phillips); Daniel Bruhl (Rush); Bradley Cooper (American Hustle); Michael Fassbender (12 Years a Slave); Jared Leto (Dallas Buyers Club)

Forgotten: James Franco, Spring Breakers

There are some actors, the Anthony Hopkins of the world, who can play any role they darn well please. There are others who only function within their own wheelhouse. Put James Franco in a Wizard of Oz film, for instance, and it’s just awkward. Ask him to play a degenerate, a rebel whose cause is himself, and you’ve got something special. In Alien, the drug dealer who takes four wayward college girls under his wing in Spring Breakers, Franco takes an enormous risk.

Alien is a successful and talented musician, but his day job’s just a hobby. Here is a villain who understands only ownership, who doesn’t bother to justify any awful thing he does but rather seeks the next plateau of filth. He is a modern, cynical, cultural predator – he could help himself, but why bother? He is the temptation of giving in to a talent for manipulation. He is every moral code consciously, systematically removed. He’s the Sir Edmund Hillary of movie gangsters. Why ruin others? Because they’re there.

Alien is a cultural anger at rules no one seems to follow and a cultural boredom for one’s own passions that seem to have no value. He is an evolution of movie villain, a wayward thing, seeking to make a mark – negative or positive has no value – and to own things, guns, people, souls, because ownership is our highest cultural prize. He is an American villain, through and through, and Franco realizes him in an authentic way no other actor could.

BEST DIRECTOR – MOTION PICTURE

Nominated: Alfonso Cuaron (Gravity); Paul Greengrass (Captain Phillips); Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave); Alexander Payne (Nebraska); David O. Russell (American Hustle)

Forgotten: Baz Luhrmann, The Great Gatsby

Ostentatious. Extravagant. Melodramatic. Audiences forget that this is exactly how the novel wanted it. The slow-burn plot of a New Money millionaire in 1920s New York trying to win over his soft-spoken, lost love from her Old Money husband is a one-of-a-kind film event only Baz Luhrmann could deliver.

Luhrmann’s unequaled talents for visual splendor and anachronistic flourishes hide a thematically deep film that not only captures the novel’s love story and social class evolution, but expounds at length on its oft-overlooked themes of ownership and the aching, philosophical emptiness that drives the addiction to possess.

Luhrmann understands what so many critics arguing about the novel’s metaphors for new-breed capitalism have not – that Nick Carraway’s purpose as narrator is to provide a specifically American breed of savior. He is not a morally powerful figure providing a better example. He is a powerless figure who observes his generation, incapable of being more than a visitor to this strange culture and helpless to change anything about its single-minded obsessions. Instead, he increasingly embraces the luxury of celebrity, absorbing the perspectives of the wealthy even if he’ll never have the means to realize them. He loses a part of his philosophical grip, a part of what centers him. His newly discovered addiction to the surface of things and his in-built need for ethical depth grow increasingly in conflict, and even his best attempts at sin eating for his friends are inconsequential to the monumental self-possession and indifference of the American wealthy. He is capable, at the end, only of having a chance to save himself from the American Dream.

Luhrmann’s film adaptation is saturated in the abundance and frivolity of its characters, housed squarely in their obsessions, and is as deeply melodramatic as you can get. By way of these seeming affectations, however, it translates as fully as is possible one of the most inaccessible and philosophically complex novels America has produced.

BEST SCREENPLAY – MOTION PICTURE

Nominated: Spike Jonze (Her); Bob Nelson (Nebraska); Jeff Pope & Steve Coogan (Philomena); John Ridley (12 Years a Slave); Eric Warren Singer and David O. Russell (American Hustle)

Forgotten: Aaron Guzikowski, Prisoners

Like all good mysteries, Prisoners provides a solution that makes sense. What takes it from being a good film to a great one is that we’re left to write one protagonist’s ending. Before that, the film is intense. I crawled back in my seat. I chewed my nails off.

It’s the ending that made my jaw drop. I felt a chill up my spine when I realized what the film was really asking me. Prisoners is a film among films. It’s why we go into a dark theater for two hours and say, “Make me believe.”

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE – MOTION PICTURE

Nominated: Alex Ebert (All is Lost); Alex Heffes (Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom); Steven Price (Gravity); John Williams (The Book Thief); Hans Zimmer (12 Years a Slave)

Forgotten: M83, Oblivion

For his earlier Tron: Legacy, director Joseph Kosinski employed the French New Wave duo Daft Punk to create its soundtrack. The resulting film was a campy, off-kilter affair, but Daft Punk’s score was an overlooked achievement, bridging the synth-heavy, tonal landscapes that Tangerine Dream and Jean-Michel Jarre invented in the 1970s to the aggressive, feedback-laden dubstep of today.

For Oblivion, Kosinski sought out French electronic band M83. While the result doesn’t stand out from the crowd as much as Daft Punk’s work did, it functions better within the overall scope of its film, providing a score epic and triumphal in its orchestral nature, yet evoking undercurrents of longing and quiet desperation through themes you could plug into an 80s fantasy movie. It’s a wonderful complement to the film that is my biggest surprise of the year, and ought to be remembered among similarly momentous science-fiction scores.

BEST ORIGINAL SONG – MOTION PICTURE

Nominated: “Atlas” (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire); “Let it Go” (Frozen); “Ordinary Love” (Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom); “Please Mr. Kennedy” (Inside Llewyn Davis); “Sweeter Than Fiction” (One Chance)

Forgotten: “I See Fire” by Ed Sheeran, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

A bittersweet monument to a stellar cliffhanger. Just listen to the link above.

*I’ve excluded the foreign language and animated film categories because I usually only get a chance to catch up on them in following years.

On DVD: Depp and Profound — “The Lone Ranger”

When I was growing up, my mother held the position of chief librarian of Native American Educational Services’ Chicago branch. During summer days off when I couldn’t get away with staying home and watching re-runs of I Love Lucy and The Beverly Hillbillies, I’d get dragged along to spend my time perusing shelves full of Native American mythology and history.

I learned what Animism was at an early age. I had as much exposure to Native American religion as I did to Christianity. I knew more about early American history from the Native American viewpoint, one of betrayal and massacre at the hands of the same people I was told were heroes and founders during the school year.

Which brings me to the new film adaptation of The Lone Ranger. Half an hour in, I was all set to write clever quips about its use of cowboy-on-cowboy cannibalism in a rote tale of heroism and vengeance in the Old West. But Gore Verbinski, the man who directed Rango and the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, has been building up to this movie for a very long time. Truth be told, The Lone Ranger is a pretty solid action movie. It’s a better comedy. And it’s an absolutely brilliant criticism of American expansionism, corporate capitalism, and military industrial politics. In fact, it does a better job of illustrating the link between these three components of our culture than certain lauded documentaries I’ve seen.

This is a film wherein hero John Reid (Armie Hammer) is a milquetoast, privileged, bookish white lawyer possessed with the notion that the American way of justice-for-all will fix all the iniquities of society at the end of the day. Lo and behold, after a few of these iniquities occur to him and his loved ones, including the aforementioned bit of cannibalism performed by Butch Cavendish (played with snide relish by William Fichtner), Reid starts to change his tune.

Enter Comanche sidekick Tonto (Johnny Depp), who convinces Reid to don a mask and become the eponymous Lone Ranger. The two bicker in the style required by buddy comedies, but their quibbles stem from Reid’s refusal to recognize or react to the obvious abuses of power taking place right under his nose. He stubbornly remains a black-and-white era hero amid a more modern, nuanced set of villains. Without giving much away, the Comanche are in danger and the transcontinental railroad stands to profit from their genocide. The Lone Ranger represents a conservative, 1950s mentality in the face of technologically–driven, modern atrocities, hopelessly faithful in the righteousness of capitalism and American law. At one point, the Ranger even remains needlessly but rather pointedly blindfolded as he’s guided by Tonto through the massacre taking place around them. This is a movie with an incredible grudge.

It’s these sorts of ridiculous sequences, juxtaposing comedy and tragedy to create a meta commentary, that have lately become Verbinski’s calling card. If Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End was stridently anti-corporate, its plot was so complex it required multiple viewings and a homemade flow chart to really start plumbing out the depths of its message. Things are pared down here, but in both films, Depp acts as the oil that keeps the engine going. Few actors would be willing, let alone able, to balance a slapstick moment against a genocidal atrocity. That moment with the blindfold is awkward, it’s deeply uncomfortable, and dammit, it works unbelievably well.

I’ll admit, I was ready to dislike Depp in this movie. I feared a Native American version of Stepin Fetchit, but The Lone Ranger is whole-heartedly on the Native American side of the argument. For the most part, Depp takes a back seat, subduing what could easily have been an over-the-top, mugging role while allowing Hammer the larger-than-life character. To Hammer’s credit, he’s willing and able to push the camp aspects of his character with a steady charm.

The core narrative is told in flashback form, as a story an elderly Tonto recounts to a little boy while residing in a circus sideshow’s “Noble Savage” display…as the display item. This allows Tonto to interject and jump around the story’s timeline, but it’s not an overused gimmick. In fact, stick around for the stinger as the credits roll for one of the most poignant and bittersweet moments in recent movie memory. Depp ought to get Oscar consideration once more, although he unfortunately won’t for this.

If I was the star-giving sort, and judging this just as an action movie, I’d give this two out of four stars. Verbinski’s action scenes are of the build-a-better mousetrap variety, and rarely involve just two sides, ratcheting up the number of moving pieces and motivations in play. They should baffle a viewer, yet the mayhem comes off with the same curious elegance of a Rube Goldberg machine that takes fifteen minutes and uses eighty different parts to eventually butter a piece of toast. For me, they work, but I wouldn’t insist someone who gets impatient with them is wrong.

The comedy is more spot-on. There are moments when a breather could be used between the monumental shifts in tone, and non sequiturs – even delivered by Depp – shouldn’t be used this often as segues. Again, it’s Depp who allows Verbinski to get away with playing so fast and loose with these shifts, but I’m not sure if I should laud the two as a burgeoning cinematic team-up for the ages or if Verbinski will have to re-learn how to convey his messages the next time Depp isn’t on board one of his films. Perhaps both.

I won’t pretend The Lone Ranger is perfect. It’s often messy because it’s attempting so much. It wears its heart on its sleeve, which doesn’t make it worse but makes it easier to criticize. It tries to balance horrible tragedy and political commentary with the action of a Saturday morning cartoon, meta comedy from an actor who may as well be leaning over from the seat next to you and stealing your popcorn, and the visual grandeur of a sumptuously shot Western.

This is an easy movie not to like because it’s an easy movie not to understand. You have to look for what Verbinski’s saying as a filmmaker to accept some of what’s happening on-screen. It can be viewed as popcorn entertainment, but I’d recommend against. It’d be like watching only half the screen. Even understanding much of the comedy requires a hefty knowledge of cinema, compounding one-liners and visual gags referring to dozens of other movies, from The Birth of a Nation and For a Few Dollars More to Curse of the Golden Flower and The Fifth Element. I’m sure I missed a dozen jokes for which I don’t have the reference points.

I expected The Lone Ranger to have solid comedy and enjoyably convoluted set pieces. I expected it to hit a certain action-adventure note. It did, but that note soured, because the film became something I didn’t expect. It became important. Verbinski candy-coated a massive guilt trip for what we as a nation did and points out as well as anybody that we haven’t changed a bit. He shows us what’s in our blood. Go swallow your hipster pride, stop pretending Johnny Depp isn’t still a vital, risk-taking actor, and marvel at a film that bites off as much raw, heady subject matter as I’ve seen any film attempt and, for the most part, get away with it.