Well, at least Venice looks pretty.
Poor Heath Ledger.
In the young man's understandable anxiety to avoid being typecast as the dumb, hunky Aussie, he takes roles in an ever-increasing number of, to put it very politely, clunkers:
The Brothers Grimm, Lords of Dogtown, Ned Kelly
(which ought to have been better than it was because it was based on the novel by Peter Carey),
The Four Feathers
. And, above all, let us not forget
A Knight's Tale
, because no one who's seen it will ever be able to dislodge it ***image1***from her horrified memory (while any film with Rufus Sewall
and
Paul Bettany in it will snag the Screener's initial attention, she confines herself to noting that Geoffrey Chaucer is perhaps not best scored with AC/DC).
Ledger usually outperforms his material in these turkeys. In a particular pair of films he so manages to emotionally strip himself-
Monster's Ball,
as a depressed, despised only son, and of course now
Brokeback Mountain
-that you can only hope he hires an agent who knows how to read (as in, scripts).
Casanova
's commitee-written screenplay wrenches itself from scene to scene, painfully leaden and fatally devoid of humor.
Poor Lasse Hallström. After leaping out of Sweden with
My Life as a Dog,
he followed up with
What's Eating Gilbert Grape
(John C Reilly in the first of many deadpan supporting roles, to say nothing of what will very likely remain Leonardo DiCaprio's most convincing work ever) and we thought, rubbing our hands together and cackling,
now he'll show them
. And he did-with a string of big-budget, extremely successful and beloved-by-large-audiences clunkers:
Something to Talk About, The Cider House Rules, Chocolat, The Shipping News
and
An Unfinished Life.
Now before your feathers ruffle and you begin to squawk about the superior artistic merits of Johnny Depp and Juliette Binoche, or J Lo and Bart the Bear, we have only two words to say, but we say them rather forcefully:
Ingmar Bergman
. True, Hallström wants to make a different type of film (big-budget, extremely successful, etc.); but even given that aim, the results have been uneven. And
Casanova
is the macerated victim of that unevenness. The result has the hasty, clumsy flavor of
The Wonderful World of Disney
circa 1975 (though to be honest, we'd rather watch
Escape to Witch Mountain
or
The Apple Dumpling Gang
than ever be forced to sit through
Casanova
again).
Poor Jeremy Irons. As the papal inquisitor in charge of capturing and executing Casanova, the script has him refer so repeatedly to the lover as a ***image2***"notorious libertine," of the horrifying Venetian "scandal," that one wonders why he's so worried we'd forget. With nothing better to do, Irons apparently decided to play Bishop Pucci for laughs; can you imagine Sir Laurence Olivier or John Gielgud taking pratfalls? Neither could we.
Finally, poor Oliver Platt. Obviously cast for this role on the strength of his performance in
Dangerous Beauty
(a far superior movie that
Casanova
obviously is referencing, to say nothing of ripping off-
and
it has Rufus Sewall in it), one of our most subtly hysterical actors is here relegated to the fat suit and then forgotten. It's like tying up Mercutio and putting him in a corner of the stage, where he'll manage to steal most scenes anyway.
Casanova
, in case you haven't already gathered this, is a blindingly awful waste of time, and the only fitting response to its creators, after the many hours of hard work they've all obviously logged, is to offer our hushed and sympathetic condolences.
