Vincent Gallo with "Brown Bunny" Marlin Brando with "One-Eyed Jacks" Dennis Hopper with "The Last Movie" Jack Nicholson with " Drive, He Said" Tim Carey with "The World's Greatest Sinner" Ed Norton with "Keeping the Faith" Jodie Foster with "Little Man Tate" Kevin Spacey with "Albino Alligator"
All of these are similar actors who make huge mistakes in misunderstanding cinematic vision. All of these choose to act from the inside out, so they don't understand how to build a long form composition from a visual vocabulary. You can start many places in building a film, but rarely does it work to start with a inner performance. (Rarely, "Bunny" worked because he had those two clever twists at the end that restructured what went before.)
Sean Penn, alone in this class knows what to do. His "The Pledge" is one of the purest performance experiences I know, together with his similar collaboration with Woody Allen in "Sweet and Lowdown." In both those, the director knew how to shrinkwrap the cinema around the performance because the single performances (Nicholson, Penn respectively) were not of a character, but a range of characters.
If this weren't Depp, it wouldn't be so amazing that it lacks imagination. That's because time and time again Depp as an actor shows that he understands a creative director's cinematic structure and how he fits in. And not just one type of approach; he has collaborated with a wide variety of visions from the synthetic to the abstract, through folded and flat, annotated and straight.
And gosh, take a look at the sets. They were designed with such amazing richness and possibilities by an eastern European creative team that understands circus. And then not leveraged in the slightest by Depp.
Much has been made of Brando's manner through his career, especially the notion that he needs a strong director who will force not only a deep performance, but will indicate the slots for him to fill in the greater composition. I'm not sure about that; I see him trying amazing things even when in otherwise lazy movies.
Brando and Depp were friends and had worked together before. Its unsettling that Brando's work here seems unintegrated with anything else in the project, not even the world of Depp's character.
I hate to agree with the conventional wisdom that this is a poor film, an unsuccessful Jesus parable.
I come to these primarily to get another window into the soul of a valued actor. Some of his performances have mattered to me, and I believe no actor can be rich without being a rich person.
Well, he may be rich, but he lacks a rich compositor's eye.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
