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The Dartmouth
July 9, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Depp fails to please in 'The Libertine'

Outside of pornography, the lives of sex addicts rarely make for successful movies. As exciting as it may sound on paper, nymphomania is one of the least dramatically compelling afflictions known to film. Most sex maniacs are sad, pathetic individuals, too unpleasant to elicit pathos and too transparent to hold our interest. This is true even when the sex maniac in question is played by Johnny Depp, whose tremendous charm is rendered useless in this repelling role.

Depp portrays the 17th-century playwright John Wilmot, a bawdy poet whose sordid little life is consumed by carnal desires. The entire film consists of Wilmot having sex, getting drunk and writing plays; I hate to break it to the filmmakers, but the sex scenes are tame, the drinking scenes irrelevant and the plays aren't Shakespeare.

"The Libertine" chronicles Wilmot's life from the height of his career to his death at the tender age of 33. Despite his many sins, it seems that Wilmot enjoyed some favor in the court of King Charles II; the film opens with Charles (played by a prosthetic nose with John Malkovich attached) commissioning a play from Wilmot to commemorate his reign. Imagine George Bush hiring Howard Stern to write a rock opera about his administration, and you'll understand why I found this particular plot point a tad implausible.

When he's not working on the king's play, Wilmot spends most of his time frittering away his royal commission at an assortment of taverns and whorehouses, much to the chagrin of his sweet-faced wife (Rosamund Pike). One night, Wilmot wanders into a playhouse with some of his drinking buddies, and his eyes light upon a fetching young actress, to whom he offers his services as an acting coach. As Wilmot seeks to turn Elizabeth into a great actress and ends up falling in love with her along the way, the story begins to take the shape of a twisted Pygmalion tale; but the relationship soon peters out with the lassitude of a grade-school romance gone sour.

When the time finally comes for the play to be performed for the king, it turns out to be exactly the kind of lurid spectacle anyone with half a brain would have anticipated from a playwright like Wilmot, complete with a giant wooden phallus and onstage fellatio. The play itself should have been one of the liveliest scenes in the movie, but it lacks the build-up necessary to exploit its vulgar magnificence. Instead of the bawdy fantasia we'd hoped for, the whole thing comes across as seedy and off-putting. It's also one of many instances in the movie where we are made keenly aware of the censor's scissors chopping up the sex -- the film was hastily cut from an NC-17 to an R rating immediately before its release, and the seams are painfully obvious.

"The Libertine" is the first film by Laurence Dunmore, a stage director whose aptitude for visual mood is so impressive that it deserves to be in a better movie. His vision of 17th-century England is a muddy, sweaty, decrepit tangle of flesh and grime coated in a thick gray-green miasma. Just looking at the film, you can almost smell the waves of unwashed decadence rolling off the screen. It's a pity that the script (adapted by Stephen Jeffreys from his stage play) can't keep pace with the scenery. Moments that are supposed to zing with energy get weighed down by circuitous dialogue, the curse of the mediocre stage-to-screen adaptation. Consider the scene in which Wilmot first courts Elizabeth; their repartee has the potential to be romantic or combative or even amusing, but after ten minutes it's not much of anything.

If the language comes across as clunky, Depp himself can hardly be blamed for the fault. He lunges head-first into the title role, deliberately shedding every ounce of his famous charisma to become the most loathsome character he's ever played. At times, the performance reminded me of Malkovich in his younger days -- the impertinent pout, the self-confident swagger -- but Depp brings a ferocity to the part that is entirely his own. Still, the unabashed monstrosity of Depp's character can't overcome the unavoidable fact that there's simply no arc to the man he's playing; the inevitability of Wilmot's eventual self-destruction hangs like a millstone on the entire film, dragging down the dramatic tension to the point where we simply cease to care.

Watching Depp decompose onscreen, I found myself filled with the unpleasant desire for him to get it over with and die so as to put us both out of our misery. In its final scenes, "The Libertine" dwindles down to yet another tale of a hedonist who yearns for lost love on his deathbed; I suppose there's nothing particularly wrong with such a conclusion, but for all the filth we've had to climb through to get there, I'd hoped for a bit more.