Directed by Laurence Dunmore

The Weinstein Company

2 stars



I, like many women of my age and demographic, have an all-consuming crush on Johnny Depp. I love his taut facial expressions, his manly shoulders, and his two illegitimate French children. Therefore, I was extremely disappointed when, half-0way through “The Libertine,” Depp gets syphilis and develops excruciating, puss-laden lesions all over his face.

“The Libertine” may be a cinematic mess, syphilis or no syphilis, but it got significantly worse when I had to cower and yell at my embattled and traumatized friend, “Tell me when its over!” every time Depp came on screen.

“The Libertine,” details the life of John Wilmot, the second Duke of Rochester, whose unparalleled bisexual licentiousness made him both a legend and a man reviled. He was extremely witty and intelligent, but his cynicism ultimately impelled his self-destruction.

Depp’s Wilmot is completely and utterly unlikable. He scorns the overtures of his long-suffering wife (played by a rather wan-looking Rosamund Pike of “Pride & Prejudice”). He drinks and constantly has sex with whores of any persuasion. He has an ill-fated affair with an actress, Elizabeth Barry (Samantha Morton, who is both incredibly surly and has incredibly greasy hair), whose bitter betrayal prompts him to castigate King Charles the Second (John Malkovich, sporting a prosthetic nose) with a scathing play that implies that he (the king) is a dildo.

This all leads, of course, to eventual ruin, loss of bladder control and hideous sores, (and then, predictably, weird masks and a steel nose to cover the sores).

Midway through the movie, I was confused as to why I should care about any of this. The characters talk constantly, mostly in quasi-literary soliloquies that make no sense, but that are said in a forceful way as if to pretend they actually do, and sometimes peppered with decidedly modern expressions for the 17th century (such as, “fuck you!”). No one’s inner-motivations are explored in a satisfactory or unself-conscious way. Women seem to have no inner motivations at all, except a heart-felt desire to be long-suffering or mercenary and spunky.

This is Laurence Dunmore’s first directorial effort, and he seems obsessed with showing how dirty the seventeenth century was, which I guess is a pretty noble pursuit. Thus, everyone’s hair is disgusting, fingernails are teeming with grime, and the floors are perpetually covered in bodily fluids. England is shown as being encased in a yellow uncertain fog, and over-flowing with perpetual massive orgies. The film is aesthetically ambitious, but eventually borders on being pretentious.

The main problem with “The Libertine” is that it is heavy handed, but not about anything exactly. It seems as if Dunmore wanted the audience to take away a deeper message from the movie, perhaps about the sex-filled soullessness of our own times. All I ended up feeling was that I was resolved to never contract an STD. The same end could have been accomplished by watching an after-school special starring Amy Jo Johnson.

—Staff writer Rebecca M. Harrington can be reached at harring@fas.harvard.edu.