08.07.06
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
(Note: There are some things in here that could be considered mildly spoiler-ish if one knows nothing about the film.)
I loved the first PotC movie. I loved it enough to see it multiple times, something that’s become increasingly rare for me with mainstrem Hollywood releases. I loved it in part because it was so unexpected; who would have thought that a movie based on a theme park ride, of all things, and with Jerry Bruckheimer’s name on it, would have been such fun, loaded with such richness of character and place and a genuine sense that the people who made it had a really good time, rather than it just being an empty exercise in noise and branding?
And so, while I definitely looked forward to Dead Man’s Chest, I also came at it with trepidation, because it’s a sequel.
Dead Man’s Chest is very, very much a sequel. It suffers from the sequel motto of “bigger, louder, MORE” that most sequels do, and thereby sums up for me what is precisely the problem with the sequel model. I think the core appeal of a sequel is that there’s something about the story or the characters that people are attracted to; they want to see what else happens to those characters or what more goes on in the world that the first movie created, and if the story is well-written, it shouldn’t need anything else. But Hollywood, with its perpetual combination of greed, arrogance, and insecurity, rarely seems to trust the characters and story on their own. It has to lard sequels up with more action, more comedy, more noise, more toys, out of fear that the audience won’t come back without greater flash. And over the past couple of decades, we, the audience, have become complicit with that, accepting empty sequels that all too often cheat the characters and stories we loved in the first place for the sake of all that extra flash, and the cycle perpetuates.
DMC doesn’t cheat the characters and story, not exactly. But it does load up with action and comedy and noise and toys that aren’t really necessary. We get an extended sequence on an island of cannibals that is little more than an excuse for Jack and Will to meet cute, and for cheap, shallow laughs. We get a big, flashy swordfight that is a great set piece, but exists solely to be a set piece (and seriously shorts the actual swordfighting; I’m deeply disappointed at the poor quality of the fight scenes in this film). We get lots of bang and flash on board ships that rarely feels like it adds up to much. We get glaring, beat-you-over-the-head references to the ride that was the film’s inspiration, just in case our attention spans are so ludicrously short that we forgot. We get a Jack Sparrow who is too often (especially at the beginning of the film) a parody of himself; there are times when the dialogue put in Johnny Depp’s mouth doesn’t feel like part of the character but like someone making fun of what they think the character is. And, most seriously, we get villainy that is gorgeous to look at but not nearly as shiver-inducing as it should be.
I’ve got a serious problem with Davy Jones. For all the wondrousness of technology applied towards the character (and for all of Bill Nighy’s astounding expressiveness underneath the CGI tentacles), he never feels believable. He’s neither as horror-yarn frightening as the story wants him to be (there’s no moment equivalent to Barbossa’s “You’d best be believing in ghost stories…You’re in one” from the first movie), nor given a convincing sense of the bereft, lovelorn human he was that the main plot point hinges on. He’s a joy to watch, to be sure, an unmitigated triumph of the blending of actor and technology; but I just don’t really buy him as a threat so horrible that Jack would go to any lengths to escape him. I’m also bothered by the way the film slows to a tortuga’s lumbering in most of the Flying Dutchman scenes. Perhaps the intent is to give us plenty of opportunity to marvel at the creativity of the character design (which I will readily admit is damned impressive) and the skill of the makeup and CGI artists; but those scenes do as much as the extraneous set pieces to drag the film out longer than it needs to be, and not as much as they should in moving the story along.
I’ve also got a problem with the film’s other villain, the East India Company bureaucrat Beckett. Some have complained that this is a pointless character, but I disagree. He’s the perfect foil for Jack Sparrow, a man to whom freedom matters more than anything and whose very appeal lies in that uncompromising, unfettered activity. Beckett doesn’t just want to shut Jack down; he wants to bind Jack’s actions, bury them under layers of rules and bureaucracy, and thus remove the essence of what Jack is. His earliest scenes are some of the most efficient in the film, elegantly laying out the specificity of this threat. Unfortunately, the fact that he’s stuck back in Port Royal (rather than being out on the water chasing our heroes, as Norrington was in the first film) somewhat limits the effectiveness of his villainy, and he becomes less and less compelling as the movie goes on. I think this is a terrible shame, as his potential scariness is definitely equal to that of Davy Jones, just in a different way.
And then there is the Orlando Problem. It’s much more clear in this film than it was in the first one that Will is meant to be the hero; the amount of time devoted to his interactions with his father and the number of opportunities he gets to show off make that clear. But Orlando Bloom isn’t up to the demands of being the hero, particularly when he lacks anything close to the charisma of his co-stars (never mind that he’s way prettier than even Keira Knightly, a fact that becomes distracting at times). In the first movie this didn’t matter so much, because he was always paired up with someone else. This time, he’s expected to carry large swaths of the story all by himself, and too often he drops them. This is particularly noticeable in his scenes with Stellan Skarsgard, who strives mightily to hand Bloom the sense of epic fate a hero ought to have; instead, Bloom doesn’t seem to be able to pick it up, and comes off more as a rebellious adolescent fighting with Dad about a curfew. It’s unfortunate.
Now, all of that said…I enjoyed the movie. No, really, I did, more than I expected to, in fact. For all the things that are wrong, there are still plenty of things that are distinctly right. Despite the parodic elements, Johnny Depp remains a wonder; we’re no longer surprised by Jack (which was one of the delights of the first film), but he’s still a compelling character, nicely balancing the complicated and sometimes problematic elements of the rogue, and earning our affections and concern. I’m not particularly a fan of Keira Knightly, but the ferocity of her performance here is worthy of serious respect (save for one pointless and idiotic sequence where she abruptly reverts to a shameful girliness that is completely out of character). Elizabeth spent much of the first film being a victim of circumstance, and finding her way out of it. Here, she’s the one in charge nearly all of the time, and it makes for some complex and fascinating developments. While Will might (technically) be the hero of this one, Elizabeth is its conscience, and that’s really more interesting.
There’s also an absolute wealth of secondary characters. Mr. Gibbs was a figure of low comedy as much as anything else in the first film; while he has such moments this time, he also has a great deal of gravity and dignity. We understand better his loyalty to Jack and the way the two of them work together, and why, to some extent, “Captain” Jack Sparrow is as much a creation of his first mate as of himself. I found the comedy-relief duo of Pintel and Ragetti to be more annoying than anything in the first film; they were given way too much screen time and way too many gags (particularly involving Ragetti’s glass eye). While I think DMC could have gotten by just fine without them, their presence here is more enjoyable–they’re not overused, there’s only one gag with the eye, and their patented ridiculous arguments over things they can’t possibly understand have a little more bite (particularly when taken as background notes to the issue of Elizabeth being the film’s conscience). Jonathan Pryce, who I often felt exasperation with in the first film (indeed, I maintained for a long time that the character should have been played instead by Robert Lindsay, who is much better at that kind of helpless neurotic wittering), absolutely owns his few scenes as Governor Swann; he’s far more believable here as a father trading for his daughter’s life than he ever was the first time around. We get the return of Norrington, no longer a commodore, and his character arc is in many ways the most natural-feeling of anyone in the film; he was always a character poised between honor and malignity, and Jack Davenport gets the chance to demonstrate both sides of that. Before the first film, Davenport was best known for light comedy, and it’s a treat to get a real taste of what he can do beyond that. I already mentioned Stellan Skarsgaard; what is most notable about him (aside from his attempts to make Orlando Bloom a better actor than he is) is the profound, bone-deep sense of melancholy he gives Bootstrap Bill, and doing it with barnacles and starfish plastered to his face in the bargain. His performance communicates more of Davy Jones’s evil than Jones himself does–it’s not the fate itself that’s so horrible, it’s the hopelessness that comes with it.
And then there is Tia Dalma. For a character with only two scenes, she casts a long shadow over this story, because there is clearly much, much more going on with her than we are allowed to see in this particular movie. Naomie Harris gives her everything she should have and then some; no stereotyped cackling witch (a characterization that would have been all too easy to engender), she is instead a figure of enormous, unspoken power, both mystical and sensual. She commands the screen when she’s on it, a presence who can reduce even Jack Sparrow to submissive respect, yet without doing anything but cocking her head or her hip, or modulating her voice. We don’t need to be told what she’s capable of; we can see it, in the way she moves and the way she speaks, and we understand her importance–she might not be the one who can solve the conflict between Jack and Davy Jones, but she’s an integral part of whatever will happen, even from the obscurity of her house hidden in the swamp.
She is also perhaps the starkest representation of something that I haven’t really seen addressed much, which is that these films are, at their core, dark fantasy, a genre Hollywood has often found problematic. (I’m reluctant to call them “horror,” as there’s too much good-naturedness for them to be truly, deeply scary, but there’s no question of the darkness at the core of the stories.) It wasn’t necessary to make them that; pirate stories offer ample opportunity for rip-roaring adventure and belly-laugh comedy, and it would have been just fine to go with that paradigm. Instead, the decision was made to thread darkness and fantasticness through them, to set the films in a universe where the undead and human-crustacean hybrids are entirely plausible, where magic and mysticism and the presence of powers bigger than ourselves are taken as fact. Certainly that choice ups the entertainment factor, especially for those of us who like some cthonic leavening in our adventures (even as we recognize that the forces of the upperworld are almost certainly going to prevail). But it’s also a choice that honors the mythology and superstition that surrounds the sea and that has long been woven into the lives of those who work upon it; and it brings in elements of the region in which the films are set in ways that manage to communicate the gravity of the belifs and traditions that have hold in the area. The first film’s Aztec curse (cheesy as it was on its face) was presented as the despairing horror it would be; Tia Dalma’s presence speaks of the fearsome allure that Afro-Caribbean religions carry for many, in their sense of mystery and direct power, and again, it’s not done just as cheap thrills. Hollywood is very prone to turning such things to overbearing cheese, meant to be mocked to relieve the sense of unease. Undead monkey notwithstanding, that’s not the case here. It’s a tough line to walk and a difficult thing to carry off, and one of the things that pleases me about both Pirates of the Caribbean films is that they manage it as often as they do.
Will I see the third film? Oh yeah. I gotta see how Jack gets out of his predicament, and how Elizabeth deals with her conscience. I need to see Tia Dalma again. And I definitely have to see Chow Yun-Fat. Most of all, I have to see how they carry through those threads of darkness and bring them together with the world of the everyday.