Two weeks before he returns to our screens as Captain Jack Sparrow in the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie, Johnny Depp turns up in a more challenging and ultimately more successful role — but it’s not one that will necessarily please Pirates fans.
He plays John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, the scurrilous 17th-century poet, playwright, wastrel and troublemaker. The movie’s title calls Rochester The Libertine, though that seems a polite way to describe him — and this film is not to be confused with the 2000 French movie of the same title, in which Vincent Perez, often in the nude, played Denis Diderot, autenhor of the epoch-making Encyclopaedia and an advocate for personal and political freedom in the years leading up to the French revolution. He was born some 60 years after Rochester. In relation to people such as Diderot, the term “libertine” indicates a free-thinking, anti-authoritarian political position.
Diderot’s values are at the root of what is seen today as classic liberalism, but Rochester seems to have been more like an anarchist. He was a professed atheist — about as radical as you could be in those days. He was also sexually omnivorous. All in all, Rochester was more notorious for his dissolute life than his public beliefs.
About a century after he died in 1980, the great scholar Samuel Johnson wrote of Rochester in his Lives of the Poets that, “in a course of drunken gaiety and gross sensuality, with intervals of study perhaps yet more criminal, with an avowed contempt of decency and order, a total disregard to every moral, and a resolute denial of every religious observation, he … blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness”. Summing up his attitude to life, Rochester’s most famous play was called Sodom, or, the Quintessence of Debauchery. A favourite at the licentious court of Charles II, Rochester (with characteristic self-destructiveness) managed to piss off his royal patron too, and died at age 33.
It is presumed Rochester died of syphilis, which was likely given his decades of enthusiastic whore-mongering. Famously, too, he was supposed to have undergone a deathbed conversion, recanting his atheism. This may, though, be Christian propaganda: it was the subject of many proselytising pamphlets, and by the time of his death Rochester was at the mercy of his pious mother.
The Libertine does not give us Rochester’s deathbed conversion; rightly, it seems out of character for one so defiantly scornful of all conventional morality. And the movie is concerned, above all, to create a credible portrait of this remarkable, very interesting, but seldom likeable man.
As Rochester says in a prelude to the main body of the movie, speaking straight to camera (and from beyond the grave, like Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard), he doesn’t want us to like him. This self-conscious device is part of the movie’s awareness of its own form: the style contrived by director Lawrence Dunmore, in his feature debut, and cinematographer Alexander Melman is very unlike the golden-hued period-drama approach to which we are more accustomed. It’s worlds away, for instance, from that other movie set in the era of Charles II, the rather jolly Restoration, or even the more recent and somewhat grungier drama of the period, Stage Beauty.
The Libertine is overwhelmingly dark, so leached of colour that it is practically in black and white — well, blue and white, a deep midnight blue mingled with the colour of bruises. Close-up hand-held camera also takes us right into the action, concentrating on faces and gestures more avidly than on the usual handsome period locations in reverent long shot.
Scriptwriter Stuart Jeffreys, working from his play, does a great job of putting together a fluid, gripping screenplay. In fact, all the elements combine so well that it’s only with an effort of mind that one separates them out.
Depp’s performance is outstanding, too, just as flashy as it needs to be; by comparison with his campy pirate of the Caribbean, his Rochester is a masterpiece of understatement and inner human sympathy. To embody someone so unlikeable and yet keep us entranced is no mean feat. John Malkovich, as Charles II, is note-perfect; Samantha Morton as Rochester’s theatrical protégée (though this aspect of their relationship is probably apocryphal) is entirely convincing and very touching.
Rochester, as portrayed here, is something like the singular rock star of his age, but one driven by his demons rather than the desire for stadium-filling success. If Depp, as he has said, based his Jack Sparrow on the external mannerisms of Keith Richards, then it’s as though his Rochester relates more closely to a Jim Morrison or a Sid Vicious, one who went over to the dark side early — and found himself at home there.