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Film: Dark Shadows

Country: USA

Year of Release: 2012

Director: Tim Burton

Screenwriter: Seth Grahame-Smith

Starring: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham-Carter, Michelle Pfeiffer, Johnny-Lee Miller

♥♥♥

Tim Burton must be the world’s most famous cult director. From Edward Scissorhands to Mars Attacks, Burton has produced some of the most charming and memorable films of the last 20 years, all dripping with his distinctive gothic style and surreal humour, and often imbued with large quantities of emotional truth. But despite his major contributions to cinema and the fact that he is capable of earning big money for the studios (his Alice in Wonderland has now topped $1 billion at the global box office), Tim Burton is not a household name and a Tim Burton film is not necessarily a hit – which has as much to do with the director’s integrity as it does with mainstream media’s inability to integrate his wild card genius into the terrain of genuine celebrity. Burton clearly isn’t driven by box office concerns, and he seems just as happy – happier perhaps – making small, delicately deranged films as he is with blockbusters.

All of which would help to explain the vast gulf between Dark Shadows and the film’s trailer, which sets the movie up as a laugh-a-minute exercise in ironic absurdity. The trailer has – in the grand tradition of comedy trailers – taken all the laughs and compressed them into a few minutes. But the crime is different here, because Dark Shadows is not actually a comedy. Or a drama. Or anything that can really compressed into a single word. It’s more like a fractured screwball folk song in which narrative and genre break down – and not in any clever-clever post-modern way. To put it simply, the film is nuts.

Based on the American television series that ran from 1966 to 1971, Dark Shadows makes a few tenuous attempts to locate its activities in the summer of love, but is really far more interested in its own rambling quasi-narrative in which the blood sucking Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) rises from his grave after 200 years, and sets about settling the affairs of his historic family house and contemporary descendents (who resemble a kind of Adamms Family lite). The same witch (Eva Green) who turned Barnabas into a vampire – because he ditched her and broke her heart – has now taken over the town that his family founded, and Barnabas is intent on challenging her dominance, although his implacable sexual attraction to her gets in the way somewhat.

The film’s concern for vampire mythology is just as negligible as its concern for its period. Instead, Dark Shadows is really just another excuse for Burton to put gothic make-up on Johnnie Depp, and allow Depp to do what he does best – which is acting like a deranged but hugely likeable kook with an authentically shaped heart filled with troubled yearning; the fact that he looks so fantastic in white makeup is simply a gift to Burton and to cinema. But lurking beneath the film’s surface – and the relationship between Burton and Depp – is an ongoing ode to all the horror movies that were made long before they became the kind of blood-drenched flicks we know today. Burton may have the cinematic world at his digital fingertips but his film is filled with the kind of emotional kitschery recognisable from the days of silent pictures. As such, Dark Shadows ends up feeling more like the Oscar-winning film The Artist than anything else I’ve seen this year.

This is not to praise the film by association. Dark Shadows isn’t on the same level as that heartfelt masterpiece (although some of Burton’s other films are). It is too loose and rambling to even compete, and my first impression is that this is one of Burton’s poorer works. But what the two films have in common is the way in which they use sound and image to tell a story in an almost primal way. The perfectly judged overacting and melodrama of both Jean Dujardin in The Artist and Johnny Depp in Dark Shadows allude to a feeling of emotional truth that is not actually contained in the words or images themselves. It’s all more Greek theatre than it is anything else. Which is not as facetious as it sounds; Burton’s work is nothing if not timeless and mythical, and its worth pointing out that the acting style of early Hollywood films, which the film at times echoes, comes directly from the stage.

I might change my mind about the position of Dark Shadows in Tim Burton’s extensive pantheon – his movies have a habit of growing on me, and I like many of his films more now that when I first watched them. But I should point out that a bad Tim Burton film is still more satisfying and engaging that most of the other films that you’re likely to watch this year. And so, while I thought that Dark Shadows was something of an uncontrolled mess that missed its mark, it was nonetheless a glorious, deeply felt mess that kept me engaged for its entire length. And despite its essential lightness, large chunks of the film have already made a comfortable home in my memory.