Dark Shad­ows

Glanc­ing over Tim Burton’s pre­vi­ous decade of direct­ing gigs, there’s very much a ​‘one for me, one for them’ struc­ture to his choice of mate­r­i­al: Plan­et of the Apes (one for them); Big Fish (one for me); Char­lie and the Choco­late Fac­to­ry (one for them); Sweeney Todd (one for me); Alice in Won­der­land (one for them) and, final­ly, Dark Shad­ows, which has ​‘mad per­son­al fol­ly’ daubed all over it in 10 mega­tons of fake blood.

On a pure­ly super­fi­cial lev­el, it would be hard not to con­sign Dark Shad­ows to Burton’s increas­ing­ly stuffed-to-burst draw­er of charm­ing fail­ures. But, if you can gaze beyond its piti­ful dearth of nar­ra­tive log­ic, a large sup­port­ing cast with no defin­ing traits what­so­ev­er and a script that’s all fur coat and no knick­ers, there’s actu­al­ly a decent amount to admire.

Prime among its mod­est plea­sures is the chance to track the evo­lu­tion of Burton’s long-time screen man­qué, John­ny Depp, again play­ing a roman­tic pale­face whose unstint­ing beliefs in the joys of love, fam­i­ly and com­mu­ni­ty are scup­pered by latent urges to bite people’s throats out.

As in Char­lie, Sweeney Todd and Alice, Depp remains the phys­i­cal embod­i­ment of both Burton’s entire cin­e­mat­ic project and his eccen­tric cre­ative impuls­es as a direc­tor. The most inter­est­ing and wide­ly dis­cussed aspect of his films in recent years is how such a laud­ed icon­o­clast could come up so cre­ative­ly short and so often.

Depp’s char­ac­ters address this ques­tion, all sweet, sin­cere men whose quest for puri­ty lead them, inevitably, to self-destruc­tion: equi­lib­ri­um, but often at a huge toll. In short, Dark Shad­ows is an auteurist’s dream and an audience’s nightmare.

It offers a glossy, Wes Ander­son-like update of an anti­quat­ed, fish-out-of-water Amer­i­can sit­com about a sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry vam­pire who wakes up in a 1970s Maine replete with reg­u­la­tion radio rock sound­track and lots of fun­ny hairdos.

It’s graced by a delight­ful com­ic per­for­mance from Depp, whose Barn­abas Collins is like a roman­tic, emo-inclined fusion of David Bowie, Lord Byron and Jay Gats­by. It’s not even a big per­for­mance, but sails on the back of Depp’s hilar­i­ous into­na­tion of Seth Gra­hame-Smith and John August’s ripe screenplay.

So good is Depp that no oth­er mem­ber of the ensem­ble (Jon­ny Lee Miller, Jack­ie Ear­le Haley, Chloë Grace Moretz, Michelle Pfeif­fer) gets much of a look in. Barn­abas’ angel­ic roman­tic foil, Vic­to­ria (Bel­la Heath­cote), is sup­posed to be one of the film’s cen­tral char­ac­ters, but after being intro­duced, she’s brushed aside for much of the open­ing hour. Miller, as a bald­ing younger mem­ber of the Collins clan, lit­er­al­ly has no rea­son to be in the film.

Much like the Sex and the City films, Dark Shad­ows comes across like 10 episodes of a TV show that have been sta­pled togeth­er and had all the ad breaks removed. Ini­tial­ly, the film pur­ports to be about fam­i­ly, as Barn­abas makes it his duty to put the Collins name back on the map. Then, 15 min­utes lat­er, it’s about indus­try, as Barn­abas vows to put his family’s name back on the map by reopen­ing their old fish cannery.

Then, 15 min­utes lat­er, it’s about unre­quit­ed love, as Eva Green’s bux­om witch, Angelique Bouchard, pun­ish­es Barn­abas for refus­ing to respond to her amorous advances. Then Alice Coop­er turns up, and by the final scenes, it’s about run­ning around a crum­bling fam­i­ly stack with a pump-action shotgun.

The tragedy of Dark Shad­ows is that it could so eas­i­ly have been a film that had some­thing pre­scient to say about eco­nom­ic rival­ry and the decline of fam­i­ly-run busi­ness in the US. But just as it’s inch­ing towards a break­through, things skid off the road and we’re served up some re-fried CG hi-jinx, includ­ing a ​‘wild’ (and, eh, ful­ly-clothed) sex scene that’s been pur­loined lock, stock and bar­rel from Mel Smith’s The Tall Guy.

The prob­lem with Bur­ton is every­thing has to be sweet and sour at the same time. He too often attempts to please every­one and ends up pleas­ing no-one.