Dark Shadows

Dark Shadows: Two epiphanies occur in Tim Burton’s tedious and sloppy Dark Shadows. The first involves an expression fleetingly visible through the cadaverous make-up blanching Johnny Depp’s face. After a protracted and grotesquely over-staged battle with a beautiful witch, Depp has vanquished his adversary. The woman’s mask-like features are cracking away like smashed porcelain. Dying, she gouges a hole in her ceramic breast, removes the ruby of her heart and presents it to the vampire, Barnabas Collins (Depp’s character). There is a quick close-up of Depp’s face and, for a moment, we see that he has briefly grasped that this monstrous creature authentically loved him, that her love has destroyed her, and that she is dying because of him – for just an instant, something like compassion, even, adoration, flits across the actor’s features. The other epiphany ends the film: Depp’s beloved hurls herself off a cliff and to prevent this poor, weak mortal from being dashed to pieces on the rocks, the vampire bites her throat as she falls. The woman lies broken on the jagged boulders with a tempestuous sea bursting all around the lovers. Suddenly, her eyes open, are encircled with dark rings, the flesh of her lips retracts and we see fangs – her ears stick out from her skull like the ears of Nosferatu: Voila! a Hollywood starlet has become the corpse bride, a figure central to Burton’s mythos. In the first epiphany, we see Burton’s characteristic sentimentality – even the most monstrous and ghastly among us deserves to be loved and, indeed, is invested with something loveable. (This message means that even nerds will find their mates if they are patient enough – a theme that explains much of the popularity of Burton’s films.) The second epiphany cleaves close to Burton’s essential necrophilia – it would take a lengthy treatise to understand why pop culture insists on this macabre theme, the transfiguration of beautiful women into no less beautiful, if grotesque, corpses: I suppose, however, Edgar Alan Poe invented this motif in American culture. Dark Shadows is a boring mess, poorly written, and under-motivated. As is typical with summer blockbusters, the plot makes no sense and is merely a rather unstable, mercurial frame on which to hang a series of spectacular, if ultimately pointless special effects. In the case of Dark Shadows, the film’s failure is a pity. There is a charming and funny 70 minute picture buried in all the gory effects, fires, and explosions – in fact, the first thirty minutes of the movie is witty and suggests good fun. The notion of an undead vampire wandering about a Maine village in the early seventies is played for laughs and, at first, the vampire’s interactions with the Collins brood is poignant and suggests that something meaningful will follow. The young governess who comes to the moldering mansion is an intriguing character but she is lost in all the sound and fury. Similarly, the children in the Collins family are interesting and their relationship with their Undead ancestor seems initially promising. But the picture devolves into a series of overwrought sex scenes entangled with all sorts of uninteresting mayhem. Burton is a gifted director and the visual aspect of the film is never less than persuasive – although all the special effects tend to numb the eye after forty minutes or so. But the piece is transparently a vanity picture for Johnny Depp. He’s in every shot and, after about an hour, we’ve seen enough of him and long for the return of the human characters – but, alas, this is Depp’s vehicle and he wants us to know it.