Excess is always wretched, whether we're talking executive-compensation packages or some guy trying to squeeze his Hummer into a parking space clearly labeled COMPACT. When we succumb to the Big Gulp ethos, as inevitably we do, it leaves us feeling shamefaced and guilty. It never leaves us laughing, and that's something Hollywood needs to think about.
There was a time when we could count on the movies to slip a $2 whoopee cushion under the seats of the rich and fatuous. Charlie Chaplin once said all he needed to make a comedy was a park, a pretty girl, a cop (representing befuddled authority) and, of course, his immortally anarchic self. All Groucho Marx required was the divinely distracted Margaret Dumont to play the stuffy rich lady he was determined to unstuff. Those movies permitted their subversive stars to invade the ballrooms and bedrooms of the privileged, if only to bring their inhabitants back down to earthiness, but they still pitched their tents close to the poverty line, where, perforce, the living was never easy but the conflicts were always very basic. There was an instinctive understanding among those moviemakers that spectacle was inimical to comedy. Wit is subtle and sly; spectacle is noisy and crushing.
But that was then, and this is now--now being the era of, to take a convenient example, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. Like the first Pirates three years ago, the sequel, which opened last week, pits Johnny Depp against something like a hundred million bucks' worth of special effects. He can't hold his own against them.
It's a shame because Depp is a skilled comic actor. His Captain Jack Sparrow is still a marvelous creation. It's not just a matter of his eye makeup or his variously funny ways of walking, running or sitting still (as when he discovers, to his dismay, that cannibals have decided to make him the main course at their banquet). It's also that Jack is, in truth, a modernist, unaccountably displaced to the 17th century and obliged to undertake the mindless heroics not only of an antique movie genre but also of the spirit of an age when all are heedlessly charging into action, swords slicing the air, instead of more sensibly retreating to their studies to think things over when danger threatens. Jack is an anachronism, engaging in a lot of desperate improvisations to keep his skin intact.
At times Depp nails the subtle touches that make for classic comedy. When he's miming alarm or confusion, for example, he does terrific things with his eyes. Sometimes they're bright with half-formed schemes. Sometimes they're addled with a flickering panic he can't entirely hide. In those moments he takes us behind the conventional hero's stoic mask and allows us to see Jack for what he is: a presexual child pretending to be a man of decisive action and romantic élan. You might say he's the anti--Errol Flynn.