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Burton's Shadows a macabre march into gothic satire

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posted Friday, May 11, 2012 - Volume 40 Issue 19

Burton's Shadows a macabre march into gothic satire
by Sara Michelle Fetters - SGN A&E Writer

I wasn't sure what to expect walking into director Tim Burton and actor Johnny Depp's latest collaboration, a big-budget Hollywood remake of creator Dan Curtis' late 1960s gothic TV soap opera Dark Shadows. Would it be another Ed Wood or Edward Scissorhands, both borderline masterpieces? Would it be a gargantuan misfire, a la Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Alice in Wonderland? Or would it be more akin to Sleepy Hollow or Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street - a nastily gruesome comedic enterprise willing to push the boundaries of taste and go places other Hollywood productions would normally fear to tread?

After watching the film, a comedic drama about family and sacrifice set to Burton's own uniquely macabre cinematic beat, I'm not quite sure what to call this new take on the venerable property. His Dark Shadows is an odd duck, never really finding solid footing yet still offering up plenty of laughs, some of them the biggest the director has crafted since Beetlejuice, and leaving me clamoring for more. It goes to some highly intriguing places and isn't afraid to slow dance across a blood-red floor. At the same time, Burton reins things in at places you'd normally expect him to go for the jugular, ultimately crafting a seriously disjointed satire of modernity that frequently recalls Robert Zemeckis' Death Becomes Her more than it does anything else.

Not that I personally have a huge problem with that, mainly because I think Zemeckis' comedy about stardom, beauty, and aging is a somewhat underrated gem that only gets better over the decades, a trait I somewhat feel Burton's Dark Shadows might eventually share. The stuff that clicks, the portions that work, the bits and pieces of screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith's satire (he also wrote the forthcoming Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter), working from a story crafted with esteemed scribe John August (Big Fish, Go), that do connect do so brilliantly, frequently going places and mocking a status quo that feels a heck of a lot more current than the era the film runs wild within.

It's hard to go into the plot without both spoiling crucial elements and making it all sound like the most absurd piece of trash ever dumped into the multiplex. The basics concern Barnabas Collins (Depp), an 18th-century gentleman cursed by witch Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green) to become a vampire and trapped inside a coffin for nearly 200 years after he callously spurned her advances. Waking up in 1972, he returns to the family mansion and discovers that those residing there are just going through the motions of life and not reveling in its warm-blooded bliss as fully as they should.

Michelle Pfeiffer, Helena Bonham Carter, Chloë Grace Moretz, Jackie Earle Haley, Jonny Lee Miller, Bella Heathcote, and Gulliver McGrath fill out the remainder of the cast, each of them a piece of the Collins mystery whose motivations for seeing the family thrive and Barnabas succeed vary considerably from person to person. All of them have a key part to play, each has a secret Barnabas needs to unlock, and figuring out how it is going to happen and whether or not they'll survive the carnage-filled finale is the McGuffin that Burton and company want the audience to believe is all that matters.

Truthfully, though, it doesn't matter, at least not as much as it appears on the surface. Burton is far more interested in riffing on society in general - the complicated dynamics of family in particular - and how times have not changed over the last four decades as much as most of us would like to think. He plays with the mores most of us take comfort in, subverting them in ways that are as idiosyncratic as they are uncouth, delivering up scandalous bits of innuendo and dialogue that might have to be heard multiple times to fully appreciate just how delectably awful, yet uncomfortably truthful, the majority of them are.

If only the movie knew what to do with itself during its climactic stretch. Watching it, I got the feeling that Burton and Grahame-Smith weren't entirely sure how things should end. They amp up the violence, pile on the surprises, and allow certain characters to rise to the occasion while others showcase skills they never had before. Yet it all becomes nothing more than chaotic tedium, nonsense piled upon nonsense, somewhat diluting much of the gory, sexually charged glory that preceded it.

I'm still willing to give Dark Shadows a mild smile of approval. I feel like when I watch it again in a year or so said smile might turn into a broadly euphoric grin - all the layers of what Burton has dug up and delivered may become more apparent when one takes a bit more time to burrow through them. I enjoyed sinking my teeth into this enterprise, drank happily much of the way from its pulsating jugular, and even if the final taste was a bit bitter the early enthusiasm generated by this ruby-red plasma kept me happily satiated until the very end.

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