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Once again, director Tim Burton gets the quirk right and, once again, he’s come under fire for doing what he does so well: recapturing the world as he sees it with the camera. Regardless of your feelings for Burton and Depp collaborations, one can certainly admit that it’s probably a very difficult thing to resurrect a soap opera that was, at once, so full of creativity and camp and also so beloved and to do it in such a manner as to not offend.
Dark Shadows, running weekdays from 1966 to 1971, was a groundbreaking soap that featured werewolves, zombies, monsters, witches, time travel and, a year into its run introduced the world to a vampire named Barnabas Collins. It takes only a few minutes - once The Moody Blues playing “Nights in White Satin” kicks in - to realize that Burton’s playing off his past successes, namely Sleepy Hollow, Beetlejuice, and Edward Scissorhands, and giving us something that is just as skillfully balanced and fun.
Screenwriters Seth Grahame-Smith and John August turn up the spoof volume while keeping their tale sincere and highly enjoyable. Barnabas (Depp - again!!! - looking like Dr. Caligari’s near-silent somnambulist) wakes from a 200 year cursed slumber and finds himself in very much alive 1972. No, it's not Hammer horror we are heading into. We've got camp and laughter before the bloodshed. Fascinated by roads, Barnabas interprets car headlights as the devil’s eyes. The electric hum and shine of a McDonald’s sign is the glowing presence of Mephistopheles. In this manner Dark Shadows earns most of its humor from the whole fish-out-of-water routine that Smith and August freely play with. Most jokes land with great gothic gusto. Some gags just barely miss the mark, but all are sold with an agreeable energy.
After recovering from the disrepair his estate and his distant relatives are in, Barnabas works quickly to make things right again. He comes clean to lady of the house, Michelle Pfeiffer in a performance that is a wonderfully strong return to the screen, and promises not to tell the other members of the Collinwood Manor – actors Jonny Lee Miller, Chloë Moretz (a scene stealer), Gulliver McGrath, Jackie Earle Haley and Helena Bonham Carter – which makes for some wonderfully twisted moments of plain sight comedy. For the win, screenwriters Smith and August swoop in with rich moments of spoofing the early 70’s culture (counter and otherwise) as Barnabas does his best to reclaim his position as master of the household without drawing attention to his vampirisms and killing too many people.
Actress Eva Green, the witch responsible for his curse as a vampire and his 200-year sleep, is also kicking about in 1972. It seems that her whole reason for existing (as she never died) is to rob the Collins family of their wealth; all of it. She’s both excited and pissed at Barnabas’s return to the fold and tries – several times – to woo him all over again. Their old game resumes, but he’s just not interested in mating with witches and his woes - both women and otherwise - are cramping his style. There's no peace - not when the ghost in his manor of his past love are a haunting – actress Bella Heathcote in a two role performance.
Burton mines the material that, on the screen, reads as a wonderful throwback to the early years of his career. Dark Shadows presents a design that showcases the greatest hits of Burton and, somehow, signals a more adult (read as sexier and bloodier) version of the artist at work. Much of the film feels familiar and yet never forced. Staying in a uniform motion is his imagination and those tired of “that” look simply need to move on from the talkback boards. Step away from the keyboard, freaks. From Depp’s use of his hands (Hello, Lugosi!!!) to the syncopated rhythms of the outside world as it descends upon Barnabas, there’s nothing here that haters are going to like. This is Burton doing Burton doing Dark Shadows; he both owns and honors the material.
While the camera is pure modern day Burton – ala no swerving and winding, windswept movements – there’s no mistaking whose vision this is. Burton loves the pasty look of his actors, the sunken-faced, big-eyed appeal of his cast and to expect anything different at this stage is just foolish.
While there’s a case to be made for restraint (no fancy opening credit sequence), certain shots eerily resemble key scenes in Beetlejuice as are the bizarre appearances of the family that surrounds Barnabas. Are these 70’s-styled doppelgangers for Winona Ryder’s family from Beetlejuice? Sequences are somehow familiar and bizarre; the abandonment of a child more than resembles the Cobblepot story in look and function in Batman Returns. The eerie forest surroundings could have been straight out of Sleepy Hollow and the pop culture satire at the expense of the 1970’s is not unlike the send-up that went on in Mars Attacks.
And yet when The Carpenter’s classic “Top of the World” plays in its entirety and, as the bat guano hits the floor, Alice Cooper makes an appearance as himself for a couple of live performances, the heightened look of the film inside a culture of POP and fizz suddenly makes complete sense. For Burton, this soapy world is a garden of wondrous delight and he gleefully digs in, inviting us to do the same, as he pokes and prods reality along the way in this fun madcap meltdown version of Dark Shadows.
Go see it with a family member and watch dysfunction get demonized.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for comic horror violence, sexual content, some drug use, language and smoking.
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