DARK SHADOWS: You’ll Have to Imagine Us On a Better Day

Dark Shadows (2012) – Directed by Tim Burton – Starring Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Helena Bonham Carter, Eva Green, Jackie Earle Haley, Jonny Lee Miller, Chloë Grace Moretz, Bella Heathcote, Christopher Lee, and Alice Cooper.

“These people might be freaks and weirdos, but don’t freak and weirdos deserve to be happy, too?”

That quote does not come from DARK SHADOWS, which takes the title for being the worst Tim Burton movie made to date, but rather from Derrick Ferguson on the Better in the Dark #129 podcast. In episode #129, Derrick and Tom Deja hold a Director’s Court on the career of Tim Burton. (And if you like Burton, or movies, or good conversation, you should be listening to the BITD podcast; I’m listening to #129 right now as I write this review.) They released this episode back prior to the release of DARK SHADOWS so they don’t discuss this latest Burton/Depp team-up but it’s all the better they don’t because DARK SHADOWS is as bad a movie as a major talent like Tim Burton could ever hope to release.

At the end of the film, Victoria Winters (Bella Heathcote) has been turned into a vampire by Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp). He calls her Victoria and she corrects him, telling him her name is, “Josette,” which was the name of the original love of Barnabas’ life, who looks just like Maggie Evans, which is Victoria Winters’ real name. The person I saw the movie with asked me if we were supposed to think Victoria had become Josette, or if she had always been Josette.

My answer?

I don’t care.

I don’t. DARK SHADOWS is brutal, awful, bad film making. If it was just a bad movie, I wouldn’t freak out because bad movies happen all the time. What’s unforgivable about SHADOWS is that it’s a poorly made film and a director with all of Burton’s talent should not be making fundamentally flawed movies. He can make bad movies but not poorly made ones, and DARK SHADOWS has so many problems that I felt like Burton turned in his film and then someone who hates him re-cut it to make it as stupid as possible.

There are problems with tone and narrative here, and I’ll start with tone.

DARK SHADOWS has no idea what it wants to be. It’s ostensibly a horror-comedy, but it’s neither scary nor funny. Really, it’s a bad comedy because there’s very little attempt to do anything horror-related, at all, beyond the “mob captures the monster at his castle” sequence early in the film. There’s an attempt to have a love plot going on, but it’s barely touched upon and it’s given lip service instead of active proof. Barnabas falls in love with Victoria because she looks like Josette.

That’s it.

He has much more passion with Angelique (Eva Green), even though he doesn’t love her. Heck, he has more passion with Dr. Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter) than he has with Victoria, which isn’t a bad thing because Victoria looks like she’s 16.

Right, so I’m now listening to the portion of the BITD podcast where they touch on the unseen DARK SHADOWS and Tom Deja makes the point that Johnny Depp’s Barnabas looks like (based on the TV commercials) it’s another role where Depp’s conception of the character is all artifice. Without seeing the movie, Tom has rather nailed it, but the artifice critique really applies to the whole film – you know, except for the actually being clever part. Things just happen here and then disappear and you get the feeling they just happen because they make a good scene or have a good visual and not because they add to the film’s narrative. There’s no consistency here, in feel or story.

For instance, the movie opens two centuries ago and we get the whole back story of Barnabas not being in love with Angelique, and Angelique actually being a witch, and casting spells that sends his real love off a cliff. She curses him with becoming a vampire and then turns the town against him, sticking him in a coffin. Great.

We cut to the present and spend a good amount of time introducing Maggie Evans/Victoria Winters in 1972. First, she’s on a train, then she gets a ride from some hippies, then she ends up at Collinwood where she gets hired to play governess to David Collins, a young kid who thinks he can talk to his dead mom. Pretty clearly, the film has set up Barnabas and Victoria to be the two leads of the film because it’s taken all this time introducing them.

It’s rather curious, then, when Victoria then proceeds to largely disappear from the film for huge chunks of time.

What?

The love story is never really developed; they’re both drawn to each other and that’s apparently all the film has to say about love.

And that’s where the film falters in terms of character. Barnabas is a monster, but not because he’s a vampire with a pale look, but because (in the past) he’s screwing Angelique without being in love with her. Angelique’s rage is lit when she tells Barnabas she wants to hear that he loves her, but Barnabas refuses, and says that wouldn’t be true. Now, that alone doesn’t make him a monster because lots of guys sleep with women they don’t love, but when you add in the fact that Barnabas lives in the house and Angelique works there as an employee of the family, things get a bit trickier.

Still, not wholly a bad guy at this point. But cut to the present where he falls in love with Victoria, and then proceeds to have sex with Dr. Hoffman and Angelique on the side. He slaughters the workers who free him from his coffin and the hippies who help him understand the contemporary world, but the film treats these events as coldly as Barnabas does. At the end of the film, Barnabas tells Angelique that her curse is that she’s incapable of love, but she’s not. Her love is misguided, but there’s no indication at all that Angelique was anything but in love with Barnabas back in the 18th century. Her problem isn’t that she cannot love, but that she cannot move on from who she believes to be her one, true love.

Think back to Derrick’s quote up at the top of this review. He perfectly encapsulates the heart of Tim Burton’s movies, but there’s no heart in DARK SHADOWS. The Collins’ family endures, but there’s no sense of family here. The mom (Michelle Pfeiffer) is the hard matriarch overseeing the downfall of the family business. Her brother (Jonny Lee Miller) is a letch, who eyes the newly arrived Victoria like a piece of meat to be humped, but then never, ever talks to her. Mom’s daughter Carolyn (Chloë Grace Moretz) is an angry, isolated teen who wants to run away. And the brother’s son (Gulliver McGrath) talks to his dead mom and no one believes him. They are dysfunctional and the film ultimately tries to bind them through their supernatural abilities: David talks to the dead, Barnabas is a vampire, and Carolyn is a werewolf (which comes out of nowhere), and Michelle Pfeiffer is, um, a mom?

DARK SHADOWS tries to draw a line about who’s the actual monster because David’s father chooses to leave Collinwood with a huge sum of cash instead of acting like David’s dad, but the film hasn’t taken the time to make them seem like real people, so I don’t care.

Carolyn’s status as a werewolf is a good example of things just happening. It comes out of nowhere, which is just as bad as things going nowhere. When Barnabas returns, he decides he’s going to restore the family’s business to its former glory. So he goes and hypnotizes Christopher Lee and then they have a ceremony where they open the factory and then … nada. The next time the cannery plays any role in the film of note is when Angelique blows it up.

The film probably should have set itself up as a total Barnabas vs. Angelique film because that’s where the film clearly wants to go. Eva Green is her usual gorgeous self (I have a fondness for black boots and she rocks that look deliciously) and her character provides the wildness to counter Barnabas’ bland exterior. That whole opening sequence with Victoria is time they should have spent with Angelique.

DARK SHADOWS has two positive things going for it. The first is the look of the town, which is fantastic. The second is the mid-film appearance by Alice Cooper an the use of my favorite Cooper song of all time (which is also one of my favorite overall songs of all time), “Ballad of Dwight Fry.” The song integrates wonderfully with the story during this sequence (including Carolyn speaking the little girl’s part of the song) and gives the film some much needed life, and is the only real evidence of any ingenuity from the film makers.

The theater I saw the movie in actually had a decent crowd, but there were no rumblings of approval on the way out the door. People shuffled out either complaining about the film or silently, shuffling back to the light like disappointed zombies. Tim Burton and Johnny Depp have both made bad movies in the past, but this time around they failed at the simplest aspects of storytelling.

Simply put, DARK SHADOWS is a poorly made movie, and the worst of Tim Burton’s long, illustrious career.

BATMAN RETURNS: Sickos Never Scare Me. At Least They’re Committed.

Batman Returns (1992) – Directed by Tim Burton – Starring Michael Keaton, Michelle Pfeiffer, Danny DeVito, Christopher Walken, Michael Gough, Michael Murphy, Pat Hingle, Vincent Schiavelli, Diane Salinger, and Paul Reubens.

“For much of my life, I lived under the myth that record labels were inherently evil. I was ceaselessly reminded that corporate forces stopped artists from doing what they truly desired; they pushed musicians toward predictable four-minute radio singles and frowned upon innovation, and they avariciously tried to turn art into a soulless commodity that MTV could sell to the lowest common denominator. And that did happen, sometimes. But some artists need that, or they end up making albums like this.” – Chuck Klosterman, “Injustice For All: The Lou Reed/Metallica Album,” Grantland.com, October 25, 2011

In truth, Klosterman’s quote better applies to my Alice in Wonderland review, or most of Burton’s later films and not BATMAN RETURNS, but Burton has come to strike me as a director who needs someone (whether in corporate or not) to more-than-occasionally say, “Yeah, right, listen, this is a stupid idea, Tim. You’re being zany just to be zany. It’s tired. Open up your bag and give us a new trick, eh?” At some point in his career (likely post-Ed Wood with a Big Fish caveat), Burton’s stories became unhinged, and he largely seems to have lost interest in telling stories. So much of Burton’s work has come to be characterized by the all-important, grotesque visualization of the weird and macabre that he rarely bothers to offer any semblance of realistic characters.

And by “realistic characters” I don’t mean characters that don’t have enormous heads or scissors for hands or are played by Johnny Depp.

I mean characters that feel real, that are well-rounded people full of complex emotions and problems, and not just psychological stereotypes that Burton can exploit for the purposes of stylistic weirdness. Unfortunately, BATMAN RETURNS is largely full of the latter.

I know BATMAN RETURNS has become THE Batman film for many people (including Burton), but for me it’s a dull, dreary, stupid first-half followed by a rousing back-half; in some films this would be enough, but while I like BATMAN RETURNS more than I dislike it (thanks almost wholly to the individual performances), it’s almost slavish devotion to style over substance, and it’s almost complete disinterest in either Batman or Bruce Wayne, makes me wish Burton had simply made the The Madness of Catwoman and the Penguin movie he seems so clearly to have wanted to make.

And it’s a shame we didn’t get that movie, because Michelle Pfeiffer (as Catwoman) and Danny DeVito (as the Penguin) are completely fantastic. Well, Pfeiffer is completely fantastic once Max Schreck (Christopher Walken) shoves her out of his office window and she becomes Catwoman. Before her transformation, she’s an idiot of a character, a walking stereotype of the weak-willed, dysfunctional semi-professional woman who’s desperate for a man, ignores calls from her annoying mother, and lives with a cat. Writer Daniel Waters was brought in to rewrite Sam Hamm’s original script, and he told Film Review that “Sam Hamm went back to the way comic books in general treat women, like fetishy sexual fantasy. I wanted to start off just at the lowest point in society, a very beaten down secretary.”

Right. Two things. One, Waters is right that a simple fetish sex-doll wouldn’t have been a positive character, but he’s fooling himself if he thinks that the stupid stereotype he gives us is any better. (With, you know, the usual caveat that the characters that end up on screen might not be the character that the writer put on paper.) Selina Kyle isn’t a person; she’s a dippy, gloomy collection of obnoxious traits. It’s telling that Waters thinks the “lowest point in society” is a “very beaten down secretary,” because I can think of at least one or two lower points. Like, she could be homeless. Or the captive of a religious cult. Or a drug addict. Or a writer for People magazine.

No, for Waters, the lowest point in society is the secretary to one of Gotham’s wealthiest industrialists.

Yes, sir, Selina Kyle has a hard knock life. No doubt about it.

What’s Waters’ definition of “beaten down?” That she can’t get her man to take her away for the holidays, because a woman can’t be whole if she doesn’t have a man in her life, apparently. Oh, and that she has an annoying, incessantly calling mother. Right, because a mother’s voice on an answering machine is very much like being a crack addict. Selina’s boss, too, is a big meanie because he doesn’t want her offering suggestions during Very Important Meetings with the mayor. What a jerk! It’s amazing that Amnesty International hasn’t stepped in to help her!

And let’s not forget that she has a cat, because any single woman that has a cat is clearly a beaten down woman.

Thing #2: the idea that what Hamm wrote was a “fetishy sexual fantasy,” which implies that what we get here isn’t said “fetishy sexual fantasy.” While we don’t get a Scott Lobdellian Starfire here (and if you haven’t read Laura Hudson’s brilliant takedown of the DCnU’s Starfire, go read it now – I’ll wait), thanks largely to Catwoman always owning her sexuality, exploiting herself only when it’s for her benefit and not simply for ours (such as when she slinks all over the Penguin’s bed to get him on bring him into an alliance), there is a fair amount of sexually-driven action and cheeseball dialogue that fails in being groan-inducing largely because Pfeiffer and DeVito are much better actors and Burton has crafted a much darker story than the sexually-driven camp of Joel Schumacher’s two films. There is plenty of shots of latex-hugging curves, however, and Pfeiffer drolls out dribble like:

“You poor guys. Always confusing your pistols with your privates,” to two security guards;

“Your catnip to a girl like me,” to Batman, as she straddles his prone body;

and the obnoxious: “I am Catwoman. Hear me Roar,” it’s only saved by Pfeiffer’s delivery, which has just enough meat in it to keep it from campiness.

Same goes for the Penguin. DeVito’s outstanding performance keeps his sexually-driven dialogue creepy and letchy instead of silly and campy, but there’s still plenty of cringe-worthy sexual allusions and innuendos at play here:

“I could really get into this Mayor stuff! It’s not about power. It’s about reaching out to people, touching people, groping people!”

“You’re beauty and the beast in one luscious Christmas gift pack.”

And the Ah-nuld worthy: “Just the pussy I’ve been looking for.”

What’s unfortunate is that Burton has linked sexuality with Selina and Oswald’s psychoses; sex can’t be something healthy in Burton’s Gotham, and love is a non-starter. During their one “date,” (in which Bruce creepily asks Selina to come to his house instead of taking her on a real date), Selina tells him that it’s the “so-called normal guys” that are eternally disappointing. “Sickos never scare me,” she admits. “At least they’re committed.” Later, when Bruce offers Selina the opportunity to leave the final battle scene with him so they can start a new life together, Selina rejects him by arguing, “Bruce … I would love to live with you in your castle… forever just like in a fairy tale. I just couldn’t live with myself! So don’t pretend this is a happy ending!”

It’s a false choice; Bruce is offering her a way out and a new start and Selina interprets this as some kind of ultimatum. In fact, in that sentence (which is, for all I’ve dogged Waters in this reaction, a pretty insightful take on the character), you can see Selina transforming into Catwoman all over again. It’s not surprising that she chooses the Catwoman persona, of course, since Selina Kyle was such a boring drip of a human.

But that’s what Burton does; he takes a character’s psychological make-up and then exploits it for our benefit. Selina was a drip so the transformation into Catwoman exacerbates the opposite side of that persona, which means an aggressive, sexual, whip-wielding, latex-wearing one-liner tossing babe. She’s changed, and for the better, but she’s still a damaged human being, and her damage is laid out on screen for our benefit. (Seriously, how did Burton not direct Black Swan?)

Bruce makes an attempt to help her, but it comes too late and too poorly-conceived. What Bruce offers Selina is more what Bruce needs to be healthy and less what Selina needs. It’s a great moment and one of the scenes which makes the back-half of this film so darn enjoyable.

Unfortunately, Bruce doesn’t offer to help Oswald. Probably because he doesn’t want to play smoochy with him.

Where Selina’s psychological failings manifest as sexy, Oswald’s manifest as grotesque. Burton delights in showing the enormously fat and short Cobblepot in his one-piece under garments as much as he enjoys showing off Pfeiffer’s latex one-piece. Oswald’s cotton-busting gut and spindly legs very much the antithesis of Catwoman’s latex-hugging curves. Psychologically, Oswald is living with the damage of being tossed away by his parents. It’s understandable that he might be resentful, of course, and want revenge for what’s happened to him, and DeVito is delightfully evil and easily led-astray by both Shreck and Catwoman. When he realizes that he’s been pulled off course and not to his advantage, he reacts violently. DeVito’s Penguin is my favorite of all the Batman villains committed to screen during this 1990′s run of films, and in his own way, he’s the most well-rounded character in either of Burton’s films. Unlike Selina Kyle, who’s introduced as in disarray, we actually get Oswald’s back-story here. Oswald is the one character Burton bothers to develop and thus it’s no surprise that he’s the most realistic character in the film despite his being raised by penguins in the sewers of Gotham.

The focus on Selina, Shreck, and Oswald during the first-half of the movie makes BATMAN RETURNS a dreary film to watch, however, and I was constantly left wondering what role Bruce and Batman were supposed to play. Burton simply has no interest in the character, which is a decided shame because once again Michael Keaton is phenomenal. As Bruce, he’s a cerebral, introverted grown-up who’s finally learning to become a man. While he’s still no good with the ladies, we actually get to see Bruce the Businessman here, and the boardroom scene between him and Shreck is the best scene in the film’s opening half. I could watch Walken and Keaton play off each other all day and it’s a pity there’s more scenes between Shreck and Kyle and Shreck and Oswald than there is between Shreck and Bruce.

Even their brief interaction in the film’s climactic action sequence is a great one. After Batman rips off his mask to reveal himself to Catwoman (which he doesn’t need to do because they already know each other’s secret identity, but maybe he thinks the appeal as Bruce will carry more weight). Shreck asks, “Why is Bruce Wayne dressed as Batman?” “Because he is Batman, you moron,” Catwoman growls back.

“Was Batman,” Shreck corrects, and then shoots him, conveniently getting him out of the way so Catwoman can blow her and him up.

Another problem with BATMAN RETURNS is Gotham, itself. In BATMAN, Gotham was a living, breathing entity – very much a character in its own right, but in RETURNS it’s just a set. There’s no sense of city, of community, of people being anything more than background extras.

What it is, unfortunately, is another indication that Burton is more interested in style over substance.

I’ve done two things I don’t like to do in this reaction to a movie. The first is I’ve gone out of my way to rip the writer. Making movies is such a collaborative business that I usually feel like ripping the writer is largely unfair; it’s much wiser to rip the director. In this case, however, Waters quote opens him up to criticism because he seems to be tacitly admitting he’s cool with what made its way onto the screen. Plus, he’s ripping another writer on a draft of a script we can’t see. (But, as a caveat, there’s no online link to that Film Review article and a search of their website doesn’t turn the article up so I can’t read the entirety of the piece. So it’s a mildly dumb thing for me to go off a quote reprinted on a Wikipedia page, so if the rest of that article shows a deep satisfaction with the finished product on Waters part, it’s totally my bad.)

The second thing I’ve done that I don’t like to do is concentrate too much on the negative. You might be surprised to find that I don’t hate BATMAN RETURNS. I like it, but I’m frustrated by its opening half. Once all of the pieces are in place and the action starts, RETURNS picks up. And, as I mentioned, the performances here are stellar right across the board. For all of my issues with Burton’s storytelling, the man does manage to get great performances out of actors who don’t overstay their welcome in his oeuvre (Depp, Helena Bonham Carter).

And, you know, for a movie called BATMAN RETURNS, it’d be nice to see Batman at the center of the film. If the rest of the film worked, I probably wouldn’t care as much, but Batman/Bruce is the fourth most important character in this film. I feel like we’ve lost out not seeing more of Michael Keaton in this role; even his small scenes (and they’re mostly small scenes) are so good here it’s telling that Burton just has no interest in this character because otherwise he would have used him more. I love the bit between him and Alfred (Michael Gough), when Alfred is preaching the need for security when repairing the Batmobile. Bruce replies, “Security? Who let Vicki Vale into the Batcave? I’m sitting there working. I turn around, there she is. ‘Oh, hi Vick. Come on in!’”

BATMAN RETURNS is a good film, but it’s not as good as BATMAN, and it’s not as good as either of the two Christopher Nolan films, even with the bravura performances from the four leads. There’s just too many indications here of the Burton excesses to come. For a director who’s given us the heartwarming and heartbreaking Ed Wood, Edward Scissorhands, and Big Fish, Burton is often one of the coldest directors towards his characters. Other than the Oswald Cobblepot arc, I don’t feel like Burton cares about these characters for anything more than what he can do with them visually.