Source: Salon, April
2001
Not just
another pretty face
Johnny Depp was supposed to
be another TV idol. But the beautifully underplayed roles --
like the voracious dealer in "Blow" -- are adding up to a
career.
By Stephanie Zacharek
April 19, 2001 | Johnny Depp, so
often described as androgynously beautiful, is really more
like a male cat, a creature so sure of himself that his more
masculine traits aren't the first things you notice about him.
You can see it in the way he underplays every role. Sometimes
you look at him and you think he's not doing much at all; then
you realize that what he's doing is so economical and so
understated that you can't afford to take your eyes off him
for an instant. He wastes no line, expression or arc of
movement. Like those ancient inky creatures painted on
Japanese scrolls with just two or three strokes, he's both the
suggestion and the essence of feline masculinity, all implied
muscle and Zen intelligence.
It takes that kind of muted
confidence to forge a career the way Depp has. In the late
'80s, after a few tiny film roles, he emerged seemingly out of
nowhere to become a teenage heartthrob on the TV series "21
Jump Street," the kind of taint that some actors, no matter
how talented they are, never recover from. Forget the fact
that TV actors are so often viewed (wrongly) as movie actors'
less significant second-cousins; when you're as good-looking
as Depp, it's a given that you're going to be written off as
nothing more than a pretty face. It's the most unoriginal
charge that critics and audiences can level at an actor, and
yet particularly in Depp's case, it was intoned in the press
as if it were an unassailable fact determined by a team of
brilliant research scientists. No one had much faith that Depp
could develop into anything special. While the press busied
itself with preconceived notions of the type of actor Depp was
and always would be, no one saw that he was ready to
pounce.
As
it's turned out, Depp has been an amazingly prolific actor
(he's appeared in nearly two dozen movies since his two 1990
starring roles, in Tim Burton's "Edward Scissorhands" and in
John Waters' "Crybaby"). Even more so than many of his peers,
Depp has gone out of his way to work with bright, often
idiosyncratic, directors, among them Burton, Roman Polanski,
Jim Jarmusch and Terry Gilliam. But more to the point, there's
no stock Johnny Depp role. His most recent performance, as a
kingpin cocaine runner in Ted Demme's "Blow," is unlike any
other he's played: His character wins us over early on, making
us a party to his voracious, youthful enjoyment of the glamour
and excess that come with his profession. But without turning
the performance into a dumb cautionary lesson, Depp also shows
us a vision of that character years later, at a time when
regret, as if denied entrance to his fun-loving soul, has
instead settled around his midriff in a lazy, middle-aged
paunch. The prosthetic puffiness is just an effect; Depp
carries all his weight in his eyes.
That performance is a world
apart from another starring role, Depp's portrayal of Hunter
S. Thompson in Terry Gilliam's outlandishly enjoyable 1998
"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." Depp seemed an unlikely
choice to play Thompson: He's too beautiful, too urbane, too
sane. But it's a remarkable characterization, a pure and
perfect example of how a stylized performance can cut to the
heart of a character without coming off as merely twitchy or
gimmicky. Depp plays Thompson as a hipster special-needs
child, as entranced by drugs as a kid might be with his first
set of finger paints. His hands and arms move strangely,
gracefully, exotically, as if they don't belong in any
real-life setting, or to any real-life human being -- they're
like the multiple golden arms of an ancient Shiva statue
brought to life in a Ray Harryhausen movie. Depp's bowlegged
waddle seems borrowed half from Chaplin and half from Burgess
Meredith's Penguin; his undulating line delivery recalls the
old black-and-white Popeye cartoons (you could make out only
parts of the sailor man's patter, and the legend is that the
parts you couldn't make out were filthy). Depp's Thompson is
perfectly magnified through a cartoon filter. When you think
about it, it's probably the only way to make a
larger-than-life figure like Thompson feel
real.
Just
who is this Depp creature? The press has found his personal
life endlessly fascinating, but he's not the sort of figure to
whom Hollywood dirt sticks very well. His girlfriends, most
notably Winona Ryder and Kate Moss, have been fairly
long-term; he's currently settled down with French pop singer
and actress Vanessa Paradis, with whom he has one child and
another on the way. Aside from an occasional youthful temper
tantrum, and his affiliation with the infamous Viper Room club
in Los Angeles, Depp hasn't given the gossips much fodder,
which may explain why even people who don't care much for
Hollywood blather are usually at least a little bit intrigued
by his personal life. He's just so lovely to look at: I enjoy
coming across the occasional magazine picture of Depp and
Paradis, the two of them willowy and radiant, sufficiently
starlike but without a drop of haughtiness or
pretension.
It's just a guess, but I'd hazard that Depp
works too much, and too hard, to have time to be full of
himself. (When I compare his attitude and work ethic to that
of another extraordinarily talented young actor, Leonardo
DiCaprio, I have to wonder if it's mostly DiCaprio's arrogance
that's held him back from giving a truly great performance in
years; I desperately hope he comes back.) Depp is one of those
actors who tends to work just below the popular radar: In his
recent review of "Blow," New Yorker critic David Denby lauded
Depp, even as he lamented that he's never quite broken
through. But I'd argue that Depp has broken through again and
again, so many times that it's hard to pinpoint one definable
pinnacle of glory. His subtlety is his strong suit. His star
power isn't the same brand that Julia Roberts has; there's no
false flashiness to him. He'll never be the flavor of the
month, because there's no month big enough to hold
him.
For
that reason, it's impossible to trace a logical thread from
his earliest performances to his most recent, other than the
fact that he's chosen his projects carefully, making very few
bad movies. You can say he's grown and matured as an actor (no
serious actor can age without changing), but from his earliest
performances, he showed a depth beyond his years. In "Edward
Scissorhands," as a sensitive, fragile Frankenboy with
scissors for hands, his stark white makeup and perpetually
startled-looking eyes gave him the look of a silent-screen
matinee idol; the image was like a gentle, sideways poke at
his recently shed reputation as a teenage heartthrob. His
Edward was childlike and vulnerable, but also gothically
handsome, just a step away from manhood. The role leaves a
mournful aura behind it; it's hard to shake memories of Depp's
innocently sensuous face counterbalanced with the lethal
sharpness of his hands.
Throughout the '90s, Depp proved himself to
be something of a Teflon actor, turning in terrific
performances in both good movies (like Lasse Hallström's 1993
"What's Eating Gilbert Grape," which co-starred Leonardo
DiCaprio) and lousy ones (like Jeremiah Chechik's "Benny and
Joon," released in the same year, which gave Depp the chance
to show off his gift for graceful, physical
humor).
In
1997 Depp took a turn at directing with "The Brave," featuring
a cameo by Marlon Brando, which has never been released in the
United States. (Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who
saw the movie at Cannes in 1999, called it "muddled and naive
but touching.") Also in that year, Depp starred as an
undercover FBI agent opposite Al Pacino's low-level mobster in
Mike Newell's "Donnie Brasco," a performance that put Depp's
particular brand of understatement through some new paces. His
character becomes more and more at home in his work life,
settling into his role as a fake Mafioso and almost surrogate
son to Pacino; meanwhile, back at home in his real life, his
marriage is unraveling. Depp negotiates the character's angles
beautifully, without softening or sentimentalizing him. The
performance has a grown-up richness to it, marked by a certain
type of maturity that's anything but staid or
boring.
Depp only rarely strikes a sour note. Despite
the fact that he and director Tim Burton normally have an
exceptional rapport, Depp's portrayal of the title character
in Tim Burton's 1994 "Ed Wood" is probably my least favorite
of his performances; its manic vibrations feel gimmicky and
out of step with Depp's instinctively laid-back energy. But
time and again, I've marveled at what he's done with small
roles and big ones: In 1999, he gave us a schoolboy-nervous
Ichabod Crane in Burton's lush, moody "Sleepy Hollow" -- the
sound of Ichabod quaking in his boots never drowned out the
poetry in his soul. The same year, he played a rare-book
dealer in Roman Polanski's wickedly cloven-hoofed thriller
"The Ninth Gate"; he shaped his character into a sexy, bookish
scoundrel who wasn't above being seduced by devil
girls.
Even
Depp's smaller, perhaps less-significant, roles resonate: In
2000 he played Juliette Binoche's Irish-gypsy lover in
"Chocolat." And in Julian Schnabel's astonishing "Before Night
Falls," he stood out in small dual roles, one as a Cuban
prison official with the hots for Castro, the other as a
haughtily gorgeous cross-dressing seductress.
But
my favorite Depp performance is also, I think, his oddest one.
I've seen Jim Jarmusch's 1995 "Dead Man" twice, and I still
can't unravel the mystery of Depp's portrayal of an
unintentional Wild West outlaw named William (Bill) Blake. But
then, some mysteries are meant to last for a lifetime of
viewing.
Jarmusch's use of black-and-white suits not only
the story's late 19th century setting but also the very
contours of Depp's face. It enhances the refined elegance of
his cheekbones, but those blacks, whites and grays also seem
to deepen and intensify as Depp reveals more and more layers
to Blake's character. At the beginning, as a mild-mannered
fellow who's blown into a lawless town to take an accountant's
job that's been promised to him, he's like a faded
daguerreotype in motion, a figure you can't quite get a grip
on.
But
before long, he's managed to kill a man. On the run, with a
bullet lodged in his chest, Blake hooks up with an eloquent,
hypereducated Native American (Gary Farmer), who mistakes him
for the great poet. Having decided his new friend is William
Blake, he couldn't be less interested in the truth: It's
inconsequential to him, a mere footnote. But he does foresee
Blake's troubled fate. Blake begins dying in the first 20
minutes of the movie, but instead of sapping the life out of
him, those first steps toward death electrify him. His
character, formerly a watery version of a self, becomes
intense, magnified, vibrant. The closer he moves toward death,
the more fearless and pure of spirit he becomes. He dons a
dead man's bearskin coat; he paints a mournful warrior stripe
on his forehead with a murdered fawn's blood. His
transformation is hardly peaceful: It's a metaphor for the
roots of our wild America, a place that, for all its alleged
refinement, has spilled more than its share of literal and
figurative blood.
But Depp's Blake himself isn't a metaphor: He's
a person. Depp plays Blake with the ferociousness of a
wildflower. Even in the character's early, recessive
gentleness, there's an undercurrent of fierce vitality waiting
to rush out, and before long it's running like a silent
geyser. When two marshals confront him, recognizing his face
from a wanted poster, one of them demands to know, "Are you
William Blake?" Blake counters with his own demand in the form
of a calm question, before shooting first one lawman, then the
other.
"Yes, I am. Do you know my poetry?" The shots
that follow, one after the other, read like a shout. But the
rough apology that almost imperceptibly darkens Depp's face is
a fragile couplet. It's poetry with the words rubbed out,
because sometimes, words just won't do -- unless, like Depp,
you're able to write them in invisible ink.
