Still, Depp's limitations are limitations. I have no problem looking at him for two hours, but there's no conflict, suspense, or threat when he looks back because he doesn't have depths as an actor to draw on. (He's never done anything that felt as dangerous as Javier Bardem's campfire flirtation with the soldiers in Before Night Falls, although I believe he'd be willing to give it a go.) In the end, Depp doesn't seem fully animate, which may be why we can take so much winsomeness from a grown man (though not as much as he hawks in Benny & Joon). He lets us play with him like a doll.
The acting honors thus go to Winslet, fully intuitive in a way Depp isn't. Her forthright, appraising gaze framed in that handsome face suggests, as it did in Iris and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, both an openness to experience and a definite, personal way of taking it in.
It just seems a little late in the day to be lamenting Edwardian repression. As adeptly and tastefully as the emotions are elicited, they're conceived of in a way that constantly threatens to revert from naturalism to melodrama. (Possibly the result of the movie's having been adapted from a play, Allan Knee's The Man Who Was Peter Pan.) Would anybody in the audience second the icy Mrs. Barrie's social ambitions? One of the picture's best fantastic touches comes when the Barries open the doors of their adjacent bedrooms--hers onto a void and his onto a sunlit garden. Unfortunately this touch also reinforces the melodrama: good husband, bad wife. (Why should modern audiences be pushed like in-laws to take sides in a dissolving marriage? Failed marriages aren't referendums on the spouses' personalities, with a winner and a loser. From a disinterested point-of-view the problem isn't what the wife cares about but that she and her husband care about different things.)
As for that crisply domineering mother, Christie now has a theatrical command that she didn't when she was young, but we're not asked to respect the mother's power that the actress can now quite regally display. Nor are the moviemakers able to imagine what value there would be in having a maternal guarddog at the gate. In fact, the mother is granted entrance to our good graces only when she apologizes for her formidable personality at the end. This frees us to dismiss her intentions for her widowed daughter and fatherless grandsons, from the perspective of our "correct" 2004 convictions about marriage and love and family and money.
![Dreamchild [VHS]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/217FQMY53WL._SL120_.jpg)
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
fascinating and intricate as always, thanks Alan. I haven't seen this yet (rarely do until they're out on DVD and cable), but I think I have a higher opinion of Depp's acting than you do: I thought he showed both exceptional comedic characterization and timing in Pirates, which due to having a swashbuckling 5 year-old daughter, I have seen many times. I appreciate the line he is able to walk between the broad and the subtle a little more each time, which is a very good sign.
I totally agree with your take on "torturously drab" 21 Grams, which just about killed me to watch, and about Penn in general, who I last found highly amusing in Fast Times.
2 - Alan Dale
Thanks for the comment. My problem writing about Depp is that he's so very likeable, not to mention pretty, I find myself disarmed as a critic. So I have to struggle back to reason and I guess what I was trying to describe were the limitations of likeability. I don't think he has the whipcrack way with comedy of, say,
George Clooney in Intolerable Cruelty. He barely seems like an adult. But I do agree with you that he's getting subtler. I hope I made clear that his exchanges with Radha Mitchell in this movie are superbly pointed. (Did your daughter like him in Before Night Falls? Just kidding.)
Penn is a trial when he's self-serious, always better with humor mixed in. He was generation-defining in Fast Times, but I've liked him more recently than you, in Sweet and Lowdown.
3 - Eric Olsen
I completely agree with Depp's perpetual childlikeness, though I don't find him childish, he's quite serious as far as I can tell and he seems willing to go all the way with the "blank slate" style of acting, which is either very brave or some kind of surrender.
And my daughter likes Jack, but she likes Will better in Pirates. BTW, I thought Orli was quite surprisingly good in that, showing much broader range than as Super Elf
4 - Alan Dale
The idea of "surrender" is interesting. To the director? He really is a visionary director's creature--Tim Burton, for instance.
As for Orlando Bloom, how's this for an unpopular opinion: I don't think anyone in the Ring movies will become a movie star. Jackson used the actors in limited, repetitive ways, but apart from Cate Blanchett and Ian McKellen they're pretty limited to begin with. (Maybe why Jackson cast them.) Does Viggo Mortensen have a second expression? I thought Sean Bean was impressive in the first one and Brad Dourif in the second but most of the cast was outacted by a special effect. Ouch.