Nothing to Laugh About

Excess is always wretched, whether we’re talking executive-compensation packages or some guy trying to squeeze his Hummer into a parking space clearly labeled COMPACT. When we succumb to the Big Gulp ethos, as inevitably we do, it leaves us feeling shamefaced and guilty. It never leaves us laughing, and that’s something Hollywood needs to think about.

There was a time when we could count on the movies to slip a $2 whoopee cushion under the seats of the rich and fatuous. Charlie Chaplin once said all he needed to make a comedy was a park, a pretty girl, a cop (representing befuddled authority) and, of course, his immortally anarchic self. All Groucho Marx required was the divinely distracted Margaret Dumont to play the stuffy rich lady he was determined to unstuff. Those movies permitted their subversive stars to invade the ballrooms and bedrooms of the privileged, if only to bring their inhabitants back down to earthiness, but they still pitched their tents close to the poverty line, where, perforce, the living was never easy but the conflicts were always very basic. There was an instinctive understanding among those moviemakers that spectacle was inimical to comedy. Wit is subtle and sly; spectacle is noisy and crushing.

But that was then, and this is now–now being the era of, to take a convenient example, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Like the first Pirates three years ago, the sequel, which opened last week, pits Johnny Depp against something like a hundred million bucks’ worth of special effects. He can’t hold his own against them.

It’s a shame because Depp is a skilled comic actor. His Captain Jack Sparrow is still a marvelous creation. It’s not just a matter of his eye makeup or his variously funny ways of walking, running or sitting still (as when he discovers, to his dismay, that cannibals have decided to make him the main course at their banquet). It’s also that Jack is, in truth, a modernist, unaccountably displaced to the 17th century and obliged to undertake the mindless heroics not only of an antique movie genre but also of the spirit of an age when all are heedlessly charging into action, swords slicing the air, instead of more sensibly retreating to their studies to think things over when danger threatens. Jack is an anachronism, engaging in a lot of desperate improvisations to keep his skin intact.

At times Depp nails the subtle touches that make for classic comedy. When he’s miming alarm or confusion, for example, he does terrific things with his eyes. Sometimes they’re bright with half-formed schemes. Sometimes they’re addled with a flickering panic he can’t entirely hide. In those moments he takes us behind the conventional hero’s stoic mask and allows us to see Jack for what he is: a presexual child pretending to be a man of decisive action and romantic élan. You might say he’s the anti–Errol Flynn.

But he cannot stand up to the surrounding special effects, which involve Jack and his friends (played by Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley) with serried ranks of ghostly apparitions, variants on similar figures in the first Pirates. They look as if they were recruited from the Star Wars cantina (although with even worse skin conditions), and they are as unfunny as they are undead. They are supposed to appeal to the movies’ last remaining reliable audience–adolescent males–and doubtless they will (Dead Man’s Chest sold an estimated $55 million in tickets on its opening day). But while special effects can startle and wow us, they almost never help us laugh.

Great physical comedians are a rare and perpetually endangered species. They require delicate handling. One remembers Jim Carrey emerging so brilliantly in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and the leap he caused the heart to take. When he permitted his dear self to be submerged in special effects (as in Bruce Almighty), that heart quailed and shrank. And a grownup, remembering the mirthful Depp charge of the first Pirates, is bound now to worry about him.

Depp famously based Jack’s appearance on Keith Richards, but Depp is a devotee of Chaplin as well, and Depp has it in him to be as subversive as the old master was. But he needs the austerity of surroundings–underpopulated and plain–in which all great comics function best. In the end, comedy is about exposing the individual’s quaking, quacking, ultimately triumphant soul. But special effects are just machinery, by definition heartless and brutally domineering. They squash individuality. In the movies–and not only in comedy–they have come to symbolize much that is grossly extravagant and feckless in our el grande culture.