The Libertine
Of the 12 film openings in the Boston area today, "The Libertine" is almost certainly the worst, and possibly the most enjoyable. Stinkers this rapturously self-assured don't come along often, and when they do, they deserve to be honored with the proper giggling disbelief.
Johnny Depp stars as John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester and the nastiest man in all of Restoration England. "You will not like me," he asserts in the film's prologue, but, on the contrary, this hateful aristocrat is grand fun -- a depraved, fornicating nihilist with a superiority complex the size of the Spanish Armada. "Ladies, an announcement," he continues, "I am up for it. All the time. This is not a boast or an opinion but bone-hard medical fact."
One imagines Depp reading this passage and gleefully signing on for the whole tour. Unfortunately, the rest of "The Libertine" is so hellbent on shocking us with chamber-pot squalor and syphilitic rot and period bosoms tumbling out of period corsets that it has no idea what it's trying to say. Eventually, the whole enterprise grinds to a halt in the mud.
When we meet him, Rochester has been exiled from London -- again -- for insulting the king, but he is allowed to return from idleness at his country estate and resume tavern crawling. King Charles II is played, spaniels and all, by coproducer John Malkovich, and he conveys the twee befuddlement of the boss in "Dilbert." Rochester simply can't believe this placid bureaucrat is a king and he's not.
"The Libertine" divides its time between the hero's debauches, his home life with an extremely long-suffering wife (Rosamund Pike of "Pride & Prejudice"), and his passionate affair with Elizabeth Barry (Samantha Morton), the actress he coaches to glory on the English stage. There's some disputed historical truth to this subplot, but it's parboiled in the telling, and Rochester appears to create in Lizzie Barry the first Method actor three centuries ahead of schedule.
The movie has been around for a while -- initially shown at the Toronto Film Festival in 2004, it was released in New York and LA last December in cheerfully deluded hopes of an Oscar nomination or two (reviews scotched that idea). It shows signs of an editing-room mangle as well. Despite hints that Rochester's friendship with the young Billy Downs (Rupert Friend, also of "Pride and Prejudice") is more than chummy, that plot strand gets lost with others in the general milling.
The climax, as it were, comes when Rochester presents a pornographic play to the court -- it's like a Busby Berkeley riot of merkins and marital aids -- but that inspired blast of rudeness goes nowhere. In the back half of the film, Rochester's body fails him and out comes the makeup box: rotten teeth, decaying nose, lumps of facial bloat liberally applied. Depp keeps going like a malefic Energizer Bunny, pitching his acid soliloquies to the back rows and having the time of his life.
If only the movie kept pace with him. "The Libertine" ends at least three times before it actually ends, and when Rochester has finally taken to his death bed, you sense the filmmakers have had to tie the star down just to get him there. Depp proceeds to give us the least convincing religious conversion in movie history, and why shouldn't he? As far as he's concerned, John Wilmot was just getting started.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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