Life on the Fourth Floor


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Don't See The Libertine

Posted 17:33 (GMT) 29th November 2007

It's a film. With Johnny Depp. And it's bad. Really bad. It makes Waterworld look like Lord of the Rings. It made me hate one of my favourite 17th century poets. It made me hate humanity in general. It made me hate myself for sitting through it. It made me hate the sun for providing enough light and energy for me to see the film. Was there a plot? No. Was there some kind of meaning to the disjointed sequence of scenes and events from the life of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester? Well, they told us what it all meant at the end, a super-secret meaning that was so profound celluloid cannot convey it, apparently, because I'm damned if I could pick up any kind of plot, thematic content, characterisation. Anything that made this abortion something other than what it appeared to be - a series of meaningless snapshots shat into the eyes of the audience.

Well, biopics are always disjointed, aren't they? Maybe so but it's not like they took existing historical facts and wove a story around them. The film was 98% made up. All the events of the film - all of the main events - were pure fiction. None of the things that happen to Rochester during the course of the film really happened to him. Rochester was a libertine. He was an atheist, he had lots of sex, he got into a few fights, he made a big show of not playing by the rules and he wrote a load of poetry about being an atheist, getting into fights and having lots of sex. Because he was so unrestrained, he used the words "fuck" and "cunt" a lot in his poetry. It's great stuff.

And he had this reputation as a lady's man but he deliberately undermined it by writing poems about being impotent - and the embarrassment and recriminations that follow premature ejaculation. He undermined himself even more by writing a load of semi-serious satirical poetry about what a bastard he was.

What does the film do? It takes all of the fun things about Rochester - the sex, the playfulness, the self-mockery - and throws them out the window. It takes all of the worst traits from the self-mocking poems and takes them as being serious. So, in this film Rochester really is as much of a bastard as he claimed to be but never really was. Depp could have taken this and still made the character likeable but... didn't. Instead we get Jack Sparrow minus the charm plus a stick up his ass. Yay.

And all of this funny, crude, bawdy poetry is shoe-horned in awkwardly, scattered through the script like throw pillows. It could have been like Shakespeare in Love - where they start with the literature and try to imagine the journey the writer went on in getting the work from that awful first draft to the final masterpiece. Instead we get Rochester quoting liberally from three or four of his best poems. Out of context. Apropos of nothing. Like, he suddenly launches into 'A Satyr on Charles II' and says it took him an hour to write it. Yeah, and two hours to memorize it. What kind of self-absorbed asshole learns his own poems off by heart to quote them at people? In another scene he just makes a poem up. Off the top of his head. Good thing he remembered it long enough to write it down word-for-word. This guy's memory is amazing. The best part? The poem in question is the one about premature ejaculation. When does he make it up? Whilst a prostitute gives him a blow job. Premature ejaculation. And blow jobs. How does... I mean, when can it ever be...? I don't even want to think about it.

By the way, don't let me make the film sound interesting or realistic. After she's done the prostitute says to Rochester "Don't make me care about you." Oh God.

This film is stupid. And after all this effort to make the character seem as evil, stupid and hatable as possible, what does he do on his deathbed at the end of the film? He converts to Christianity. Then the film holds up this self-quoting hateful jackass's life and asks us to make up our own minds.

This is one of the only things actually from the life of Rochester that they included. And it's wrong. That is to say, Rochester's conversion can be seen in seen in the same light as Robin Hood being the Green Knight.

Don't even see this one if you just want to look at Johnny Depp's handsome face - because you get to spend the last third of the film watching that face slowly decompose - literally falling to pieces. Little tiny pieces. As if there wasn't enough in this film to make you throw up.

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