Tim Burton and Johnny Depp inject style and humour into reboot of supernatural soap opera

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This article was published 11/05/2012 (5253 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Dark Shadows is director Tim Burton’s Gorey-est movie.

Officially, this horror-comedy-melodrama is a spinoff of the 46-year-old gothic TV soap opera produced by Dan Curtis. It was the continuing story of vampire Barnabas Collins, the centuries-old head of a Maine clan plagued by witches, werewolves and miscellaneous supernatural phenomena.

Unofficially, the premise gives Burton licence to pay affectionate homage to Edward Gorey, the American illustrator and storyteller who expressed his sublime comic gifts by rendering tragic, dark-eyed little children, corpses littering Edwardian mansions, and maidens flinging themselves off impossibly high precipices.

The source material allows Burton a droll soap opera plot on which to hang his own Gorey-inspired moving pictures.

Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) is the scion of a rich English family whose 18th-century move to Maine resulted in supernatural tragedy. The lascivious witch Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green) fell in love with Barnabas, but when he spurned her in favour of a winsome village girl Josette (Bella Heathcote), Angelique cast spells that sent Josette off an impossibly high precipice and cursed Barnabas with the eternal life of the vampire.

Entombed alive, Barnabas is revived in the year 1972 (the year the TV series Dark Shadows went off the air). The once magnificent Collins estate is in near ruins, inhabited by matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Michelle Pfeiffer), her rebellious teen daughter Carolyn (Chloe Grace Moretz), her ne’er-do-well brother-in-law Roger (Jonny Lee Miller), Roger’s literally haunted young son David (Gulliver McGrath) and the inevitable drunk groundskeeper Willie Loomis (Jackie Earle Haley).

Also in attendance is a live-in psychiatrist, Dr. Julia Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter), and a new governess, Victoria Winters (also played by Heathcote), who bears an unearthly resemblance to the centuries-dead Josette.

Barnabas discovers restoring the family fortune will not be as easy as all that, especially when he discovers the Collins’ business rival, “Angie,” is, in fact, his old lover/nemesis from 200 years ago.

The collaborations between Depp and Burton are generally fruitful (Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow) but they have been known to go wrong. Burton evidently couldn’t bring himself to rein in Depp’s unnervingly bipolar Mad Hatter in 2010’s Alice in Wonderland.

But both Burton and Depp apparently realize they’re not working with classic material here and their liberty-taking is welcome. An amusing script by John August and Seth Grahame-Smith allows Depp some comedy at the expense of the tragic-romantic hero, an alabaster-skinned ghoul with love in his heart. Of the supporting cast, the usually more reserved Green has notable fun playing a witch of unnatural passion. In contrast, Bonham Carter is almost never reserved, but she knows how to show an audience (and, incidentally, Barnabas) a good time.

In any case, the movie’s best comedy is purely visual. Blocking actors in soap opera style gives Burton the opportunity to pose his cast like figures from a Gorey storybook. The production design by Rick Heinrichs allows a gratifyingly perverse blend of gothic style with macramé owls, beanbag chairs and shag carpeting: kitsch relics dwelling among the kitsch relics.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Other voices

Selected excerpts from reviews of Dark Shadows:

 

In a time when even the most accomplished genre movies have the fingerprints of focus group-happy execs all over them, the relatively unmitigated quirk of Dark Shadows is worth celebrating.

— Glenn Kenny, MSN Movies

 

Dark Shadows sinks its teeth halfway into its potentially meaty material but hesitates to go all the way.

— Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter

 

All dressed up and no place to go.

— Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic

 

The cheesy and cheap but beloved TV program takes an affectionate ribbing in the film, which has more in common with That ’70s Show than its actual source.

— Roger Moore, McClatchy Tribune News Service

 

It’s a great time at the movies and a wickedly clever cinematic treat.

— Pete Hammond, Boxoffice magazinie

 

Burton, as usual, is great on atmosphere and comic timing (these are his weirdest moments since Ed Wood), but less so at reining in an overcomplicated plot and dimly lit action scenes.

— Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York

 

Anemic in parts, this Johnny Depp/Tim Burton reboot is still, often, a bloody blast.

— Joanna Langfield, The Movie Minute

 

— Compiled by Shane Minkin