So now, after waiting for it to come from Netflix for more than a year, I have “The Libertine” in my hand and have watched it twice, once “raw” and once “cooked” by the director’s comments. I think just about everyone felt cooked by the end of this production for a lot of reasons. Film is always about the script, the acting, the lives of the actors, the crew as a community, the community where the film is being made, and the political climate -- in this case not friendly. The film lost a third of its funding, arbitrarily and just as shooting was about to begin -- not because of morality issues, but because of government economizing. Several films were simply scrubbed. This one was a passionately enough desired project for private money to be found.
So why were the investors passionate? The casting was sublime, the subject was “hot,” and so on. But I think one of the keys is in the similarity of the times of Charles II, the Restoration, and echo in the political and religious issues of today. Briefly, at the time all four kingdoms of Great Britain had just been suffering war, their monarchs had been lost (some executed with the beheading axe), and Hobbs was telling them that this is what life is about: a short brutal struggle with no meaning to it at all. “Red in tooth and claw.” Fight, fuck and die. The Puritanism of Cromwell, who had just been thrown out of power, persisted in the background, blaming. Several versions of Christianity had been contending, confusing everyone with their dogma fights. What is the bottom line? Which brand of morality does one accept or -- since they can’t agree -- is there any Divine law that must be obeyed? How low can one go and still come back? I have to say that the famous and much discussed debauchery is pretty mild compared to what goes on these days. Nighttime orgies under a tree in the park seem almost innocent.
Charles II, like any smart king on a wobbly throne, needs most of all someone who is blunt in an eloquent and trustworthy way -- that’s Rochester’s job. A kind of court jester. That he gets carried way with his mockery might be due to the alcohol or might be due to getting tired of being owned like a King Charles spaniel, like the one that spangled the marble floor while the camera watched over the king’s shoulder.
Much criticism of this film related to the murkiness and muck of the scenes, the candle smoke and dun colors. I vote with those who found them fitting, though the heat of that many big candles made me nervous. I think young fans of the movie are reacting to the intense emotion as well as the implied permission, even approval, of doing anything one wishes. There’s not a lot of bare-naked-fucking, mostly “eye-fucking” at which Johnny Depp is mighty adept. No drugs, only booze. The pattern of women is beautifully clearcut; the casting director (who died during the movie shoot, alas!) did a masterful job of rhyming the faces of the women with Depp’s face. Francesca Annis as his mother, Elizabeth Malet as his faithful but outraged wife, Kelly Reilly as his enabling whore, and Samantha Morton as the pivotal actress are each studies in difference versions of co-dependence. (Is co-dependence a bad thing? Is it wrong to “enable” a genius?) Each fights him but needs him and in the end survives him. The men, who are different, more assorted, provide the platform for a man of the theatre who moves in a coterie that feeds on him and occasionally falls victim to him. I kept thinking of Caravaggio. Or a modern rock star -- but everyone thinks of that.
For me, the key to Rochester’s character comes early in the script. He says he cannot feel anything in ordinary life so he needs theatre. But he doesn’t just mean speaking the speech, treading the boards. He means (in this version anyway) what Marlon Brando, Hunter S. Thompson and Johnny Depp mean: the inner ransacking and challenging that actors and writers do. Laurence Dunmore, the director, in his commentary tells about what amounts to a near-sexual threesome: Depp and Morton thrusting into each other’s emotional guts while Dunmore, strapped into a handheld camera, watches from inches away, circling, probing their faces -- Depp often in half-shadow, Morton against a bonfire of candles. Dunmore says he has not had much to do with actors until now, but Depp took him in hand in much the same way as Rochester takes on Barry -- forcing and provoking and frustrating until all carapace is broken through and raw truth boils out. This is a generosity, an inclusion in Depp’s world, and it pays off for everyone.
Rochester’s final speech, staggering around the court with camera focus going in and out, is a plea for the standing order at a time when some were inclined to start up the same chaos of successions that had already done as much evil to the country as Rochester’s overindulgences had done to himself. His influence is a benefit to Charles II but Rochester claims to do it for his own reasons. The script doesn’t spend much time dithering over the political issues.
The movie is transparent in terms of the Sixties and Seventies great revolution of behavior, but more subtly I think it has a lot of similarity with the disruptions we’re sweating our way through now. How much can art compensate for -- well, I hate to say “immorality” since the “rule-breaking” here mostly seems to be alcoholism and sexual frankness. There’s nothing about corrupt diversion of wealth, starving people, or rampant violence. There are no drugs. There are no children except in street scenes. Syphilis is presented honestly as horrible but Rochester doesn’t seem to infect anyone else. It doesn’t seem to signify AIDS. Just punishment.
There are THREE deathbed scenes. One at which he discusses heaven with a chaplain but may or may not have repented, one which is real and one that is a stage version. This is theatre through and through, with all the meta- dimensions of being in it, watching it, knowing what is staged, knowing that acting is more real that ordinary life, and escaping Hobbs by entering a different dimension than the people out there in the muck living quiet lives, maybe desperately.
So what’s the bottom line? Take care of each other.
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