Misleading paths

After Johnny Depp’s latest tedious and indulgent performance in ‘Mortdecai’,
Anne Billson asks: where did it all go wrong for the talented actor?

Is it inevitable that successful Hollywood actors become caricatures of themselves? It happened to Brando, Nicholson and De Niro. And now it’s happening to Johnny Depp.

Not long ago, Depp seemed the very model of a thinking person’s film star — a bit quirky, more like an old-fashioned rock musician than a movie star ironed flat by the PR machine. He trashed hotel rooms, got into punch-ups with paparazzi, hung out with funky chicks like Winona Ryder and Kate Moss, accrued tattoos, played guitar and guested on The Fast Show.

It didn’t hurt that Brando hailed him as “the most talented actor of his generation”. And he made offbeat choices in his roles, many of which paid off. Until Pirates of the Caribbean, he wasn’t quite A-list, but he was way too cool to be consigned to the Bs and Cs.

But as Depp passes the half century mark, his separation from Vanessa Paradis and marriage to Amber Heard have turned him into tabloid fodder, a role that doesn’t suit him at all. His whimsical performance as Tonto with a dead crow on his head was blamed for the poor box-office of The Lone Ranger (though that movie was a lot more fun than many critics would have had you believe). Even his red carpet choices are coming in for stick: battered hats, tinted shades and dodgy facial hair can seem charmingly boho on a young actor, but on an older one they start looking a bit desperate. Oh Johnny, where did it go wrong?

Powerhouse of talent

John Christopher Depp II made his screen debut in 1984, puked out by a bed in A Nightmare on Elm Street, and blended into Platoon’s pretty boy harem before the TV show 21 Jump Street put him on the map — though not so much in the UK, where it only turned up on satellite later on. So it was no big deal for us on this side of the Atlantic when he subverted his teen idol status by playing a delinquent greaser with a facial tattoo in John Waters’s Cry-Baby.

He was beautiful, with beautiful cheekbones. Maybe too beautiful. (He seems to have spent his life trying to cover up his flawlessness with dodgy facial hair.) Like Leonardo DiCaprio, he looked for a long time as though he has a portrait stashed in the attic. His otherworldly looks have led to him seeming miscast as, for example, John Dillinger (not a patch on Warren Oates) in Public Enemies, or as the everyman hero of John Badham’s neat little thriller Nick of Time, or the dishevelled novelist in a tatty dressing-gown in Secret Window. Though perhaps this won’t be a problem for much longer — in The Tourist, I was shocked by how much he reminded me of comedian Rob Schneider.

But he was more impressive, anyway, when the beauty was hidden behind boy monster make-up in Edward Scissorhands — Bambi, Swiss Army Knife and Robert Smith of The Cure rolled into one in the first of nine collaborations with director Tim Burton. The performance was already showing signs of the feyness that has coloured his career, but it suited the fairytale material, and it helped that he was obliged to be inexpressive.

Because I think Depp is at his best when he’s reacting rather than “acting”, when he’s a strong blank presence against which wilder players can bounce their performances. His best work is when he allows others to steal the limelight — DiCaprio in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape or Al Pacino in Donnie Brasco — or as an anchor at the centre of oddball ensemble casts: in Ed Wood or Dead Man or The Ninth Gate or Rango.

I’ve been giving him the benefit of the doubt for so long, it’s only now, in retrospect, that I realise how much I dislike his “acting” — the Chaplin and Keaton routines in Benny & Joon, the Groucho-Marx-on-acid in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or putting on a Sarf London accent as From Hell’s Inspector Abberline. (The accents occasionally pay off — he was credible and touching with JM Barrie’s Scottish burr in Finding Neverland.)

The downfall

The extravagant party pieces are acceptable in small doses — such as Bon Bon, the transvestite who smuggles Javier Bardem’s novel out of jail in Before Night Falls by hiding it in his rectum — but when they dominate the film, they can be catastrophic. Witness Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Dark Shadows, where he’s quirky and mannered without being remotely threatening or even interesting. Of his recent work with Burton, only Sweeney Todd stands out as a rare instance of the actor’s whimsical tendencies engulfed by such blistering malevolence, it makes me wish we’d seen his dark side — and I mean his real dark side, not one of his foppy-Goth excursions — more often.

The watershed, of course, was Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Depp’s campy, flouncing Captain Jack Sparrow, modelled on Keith Richards, dismayed Disney executives, who thought he was ruining the film, but elevated a run-of-the-mill blockbuster to something deliciously off-kilter. Alas, box-office success demands more of the same, and so we got Jack Sparrow up the kazoo as he outstayed his welcome in increasingly dismal sequels. And now whimsical quirky Depp appears to have entirely overwhelmed the other, less showy Depp.

He’s far from a lost cause — his Hunter S Thompson stand-in in The Rum Diary (mercifully more low-key the one in Fear and Loathing) is a real performance, kept in check by fruity supporting turns. But the bad news is that Depp is reprising his Mad Hatter in the sequel to Alice in Wonderland — his arch, smug, orange-haired lisper was possibly an irksome lowpoint of not just his career, but of modern fantasy cinema. And his bad Terry-Thomas impersonation in Charlie Mortdecai isn’t much better, I’m afraid. This is not even a caricature, let alone a character; it’s an assembly of quirks.