The Return of Novelty Boy

The New York Sun, July 8, 2005

Once, on a gray hangover Sunday morning quite a few years ago now, I saw Johnny Depp. He was stumbling along Sixth Avenue on the way to that flea market in the 20s, and so was I. He was a wan, disheveled wreck, and so was I. But he had Kate Moss in tow, and I, well ... I did not. Even back then Johnny Depp was a star, a Cary Grant for our ragamuffin times, a tatterdemalion Tom Cruise, James Dean without the car crash, a charmer, an enigma, a talent to watch - even if, judging by the box office of most of his movies, not many people did.

That began to change with "Sleepy Hollow" and "Pirates of the Caribbean," and could change even more with "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," which opens next week. But there's an excellent opportunity to assess his work right now at "In Deppth" (sigh), a retrospective opening at the Brooklyn Academy of Music today. Over the course of three weeks, BAM will show a selection of movies that convey a real sense of Mr. Depp's range, quality, and charm. Above all, filmgoers will be left with an impression of the extraordinary presence that he brings to even the most mediocre movies ("The Ninth Gate," I'm talking about you), a presence that owes something to Mr. Depp's good looks, but much more to his talent.

The idea that Mr. Depp has achieved what he has while defying Hollywood convention, however, is not quite correct. While he's too smart for red string and Kabbalah gibberish, Mr. Depp has in many other respects stuck to the standard script for a rising star: idiot preachiness ("America is dumb; it's like a dumb puppy that has big teeth that can bite and hurt you, aggressive ... my daughter is four and my boy is one. I'd like them to see America as a toy, a broken toy. Investigate it a little, check it out, get this feeling and then get out."), tabloid scandals, the usual substances, jail time, tragedy (poor River Phoenix twitched his last outside Mr. Depp's Viper Room), an awe-inspiring sequence of girlfriends, and displays of petulance that reached an early peak at the moment when (eat your heart out, Russell Crowe) he set his underpants ablaze on the set of "21 Jump Street": Apparently his motor home hadn't been cleaned for a while. Oh well.

It was on "Jump Street," though, that Mr. Depp's career began to veer in an unexpected direction. The hairstyle, acne, and just-say-no police drama had made his name and bank balance, but the actor felt "lost, shoved down the gullets of America as a young Republican. TV Boy, heartthrob, teen idol, teen hunk ... bound for ... lunch box antiquity. Novelty boy, franchise boy." Fair enough, but it took a truly perverse imagination to believe that Mr. Depp could lose his unwanted teen-idol tag by escaping to the big screen and playing, yes, a teen idol.

Yet in John Waters's delirious, delightful, and ridiculous "Cry-Baby" (screening July 10), he did. As the absurd, delinquent, but strangely appealing Wade "Cry-Baby" Walker, Mr. Depp is a beautiful, low-rent Elvis, shaking, sneering, and seducing his way through a performance that parodies both the heroes of our rockabilly past and the sort of stardom that Mr. Depp himself had been meant to aspire to. After "Cry-Baby," Mr. Depp's face may still have graced People, but his mind, it was clear, was elsewhere.

That movie pointed the way that Mr. Depp's career would go. It showed his endearing willingness to forgo other more commercial projects in exchange for the opportunity to work in films that he found intriguing, even if their directors - like Mr. Waters himself, or Jim Jarmusch ("Dead Man") or, in a sense, Tim Burton ("Edward Scissorhands," "Sleepy Hollow," and "Charlie") were outside the Hollywood mainstream. Also, it's notable (even if it's somewhat obscured by the carnival cast of grotesques, misfits, and oddities with whom, typically, John Waters peoples "Cry-Baby") that Wade Walker was the first of the oddball roles with which Johnny Depp, the boy who didn't want to be "novelty boy," was to make his name.

Until then, Mr. Depp's roles had been routine fare for a star on the make. He appeared without his trousers - or anything else - in a lowbrow sex comedy ("Private Resort"), he was shot at by the Viet Cong in "Platoon," and butchered by Freddie Krueger in "A Nightmare on Elm Street." In Wade's wake, however, he replaced the generic with the exotic, becoming something of a showcase for the peculiar, most notably with his two special Eds, Scissorhands and Wood, and, in "Pirates of the Caribbean," with Jack Sparrow, the weirdest scoundrel ever to sail the Spanish Main.

To Lasse Hallstrom, who directed Mr. Depp in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape," a film in which the actor shone in a more normal role, Mr. Depp's preference for offbeat characters was a way of hiding in plain sight, concealed behind the eccentricities of those he portrayed. Perhaps, but it's more likely that Mr. Depp, a man who once bought the house which was (reputedly) the site of Munchkin orgies during the filming of "The Wizard of Oz," gravitated naturally toward roles that appealed to his well-developed sense of the bizarre, something that he often exploits but never abuses. The strangeness of the characters he plays is not an excuse to descend into pastiche, caricature or ham. Mr. Depp takes them seriously, and so, therefore, should we.

Inevitably, there are omissions at BAM, mainly recent offerings such as "Pirates," "Blow," and, mercifully, the overrated "Finding Neverland" (Ian Holm was a far more convincing Barrie in a BBC version of the same story). Fans of film fiasco will be disappointed that there's no opportunity to judge "The Brave," the only movie that Mr. Depp has ever directed, a project probably doomed from the moment that he decided to bless the beginning of filming with a Native American ritual.

No time to see all that BAM has to offer? Well, for a sense of Mr. Depp's range, try his subtle, sensitive portrayal of the conflicted undercover cop in "Donnie Brasco" (July 15), a character far removed from his usual madcap menagerie. Then there's the hypnotic "Dead Man" (July 30), an extraordinary, slow, slow, slow Western, teetering uneasily between a dream and a joke, with Mr. Depp compelling as he drifts helplessly toward his fate. But if there's only one film you can catch, it has to be "Edward Scissorhands" (July 9), Mr. Burton's masterpiece, and Mr. Depp's, too. A gorgeous fairy tale, this kinder, gentler "Frankenstein" has an almost mute Mr. Depp strapped into a leather bodysuit, those legendary looks lost under stark white makeup and a tangled black wig. Despite these handicaps, Mr. Depp somehow uses minimal dialogue, marvelously expressive eyes, and the tricks of an accomplished mime to convey the very essence of the being he portrays.

It's a performance that he hasn't topped, and there are some signs from his latest work that he may never do so. His Jack Sparrow was a wild, wonderful and inspired comic creation. Sparrow transformed "Pirates of the Caribbean" from dross into gold, but plans for a sequel and the imminent release of "Charlie" may be a harbinger of something altogether less welcome: the return of novelty boy, this time as a licensed, lovable eccentric, good box office certainly but entirely lacking the edge that has made Mr. Depp so great for so long.

Let's hope not.