A fight for the right

Depp's talent

In 1996 a Don Juan DeMarco-era Johnny Depp went off into the Mojave Desert to make his first, and so far only, feature-length foray into directing. After the weird and wonderful trifecta of What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Benny & Joon and Ed Wood, Depp was cresting the early summit of his career as a movie star.

Though notoriously unsuccessful at the box office, Depp could have probably collected his usual multimillion-dollar payday for any of the top projects in Hollywood then — much as he did with the coming Lone Ranger. What he chose instead was The Brave, a movie about an American Indian who agrees to be the subject of a snuff film.

Based on the novel by Gregory McDonald, The Brave follows this wastrel-with-a-heart-of-gold (played by Depp with a David Foster Wallace bandana) in the last week of his life, as he makes peace with his family and spends the $50,000 he has accepted to be tortured and murdered by a spiritual sadist (Marlon Brando). Though it had its premiere at Cannes and, as is typical there, received both a standing ovation and abysmal reviews, the film was never released Stateside.

Back to roots

The movie isn’t terrible — it’s not good — but it does raise the question: Why? Why spend the celebrity capital he had so carefully, if eccentrically, amassed to make it? To get anything done in Hollywood, even if you are Johnny Depp, takes years of often heartbreaking obsession, not to mention millions of dollars. So for him to step behind the camera to make The Brave, bringing a historically underrepresented perspective to the screen, suggests he thought it was worth the trouble. And that decision makes the choice of this honorary member of the Comanche nation to play the unflattering character of Tonto in The Lone Ranger surprising.

Depp, now 50, has often, if vaguely, claimed to be a Cherokee descent through his Kentuckian grandmother. Playing the vaguely pan-tribal Raphael in The Brave, it seems, gave him a chance to inhabit that piece of his identity, albeit with a suffocating lack of subtlety. We may never doubt that Raphael is heroic in Depp’s eyes, but we begin to suspect that his drinking, his reservation life, and unspecified tribal identity are meant to be understood as shorthand for suffering, persecution and injustice. But though it rather bludgeons with earnestness, there is little doubt that this paean to an Indian outlaw was personal for Depp.

So too, apparently, was Jim Jarmusch’s quiet little black-and-white western Dead Man, for which Depp reportedly turned down the lead roles in Speed, Legends of the Fall and Interview With the Vampire. After suffering an ultimately fatal gunshot wound, his character, an accountant from Cleveland named William Blake, is led through a spiritual wilderness and Jarmusch’s elegant allegory by an Indian named Nobody (Gary Farmer).

Beneath the howling Neil Young score and the deadpan comedy, Dead Man, is, like The Brave, inflected with deep sensitivity to, if not reverence for, native American culture. But, unlike The Brave, Dead Man is a great film — possibly both Depp’s and Jarmusch’s best — the most significant entry in Depp’s catalog of Native Americanalia until The Lone Ranger.
From his inception in film and radio serials of the 1930s, Tonto was only ever rendered in the most simplistic terms, as a foil and companion with whom the otherwise very lone, and thus radio silent, Ranger could interact. The character may seem a counterintuitive choice for someone who has linked his personal myth with American Indian imagery, but as befits a star who has built his career on playing outlaws and oddballs. Depp argues that his Tonto is a rebel, upending stereotypes, empowering Indians even. “I wanted to maybe give some hope to kids on the reservations,” he told Rolling Stone.

It would be impressive, even for a self-styled subversive like Depp, to turn Hollywood’s long, ugly history of American Indian representation on its head with a single movie. And with his feather-festooned Tonto, based on Kirby Sattler’s painting I Am Crow, Depp can again do his scene-stealing bit.