|
COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
What, I wonder, would the great swordsman Errol Flynn have made of Johnny Depp's fey, capering performance in "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl"? As Jack Sparrow, the deposed pirate captain of the Black Pearl, Depp does not so much walk as sashay into a scene, and his center of gravity seems to have risen somewhere close to his Adam's apple--Jack is a man who can't find his land legs. Depp speaks in a rich, deep, but frequently inaudible islands gurgle, his skin is a lacquered bronze, and he has two braided beard strands, like a Chinese sage. In most of the scenes, he wears more eye shadow than Tammy Faye Bakker. Part buffoon, part wandering, improvising liar--a sort of rum-soaked Odysseus who has no Ithaca to go home to--Depp's Captain Jack gives this family picture an amiable sheen of silliness (his performance has diverse echoes of W. C. Fields, Toshiro Mifune, and Keith Richards on a bender). The old buccaneer movies, with their dashing heroes and their ladies whose bosoms swelled like the seven seas, were often close to parody, but none of them offered anything as juicily ridiculous as Depp's popinjay pirate--a strange private joke on display in the middle of a hundred-and-twenty-five-million-dollar Jerry...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
