Harmless and without risk. Humorous but not really all that funny. This is Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows in a nutshell. I didn’t dislike it as much as I didn’t like it. The Tim Burton and Johnny Depp teaming has clearly fallen into a rut as the budgets have ballooned and the creativity has evaporated. Then again, I can’t really say I’ve found any prolonged love for Burton’s work, especially in the last 15 years or so.
His two best films, as far as I’m concerned, were released one after the other — Ed Wood in 1994 and Mars Attacks! in 1996. Not so surprising, those are also his two least commercially successful films, which is probably why he hasn’t done anything like them since.
With Burton’s latest trend of remaking previous films that lend well to his particularly dark aesthetic, love of crooked trees, gothic manors and spooky Danny Elfman scores, Dark Shadows fits right alongside his take on Alice in Wonderland and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. All films I won’t likely ever return to again, but neither do I hold an particular disdain for any of them., though Charlie is quite disagreeable.
Film reviewing nowadays seems to depend entirely on loving a film or hating it, falling down the middle isn’t much of an option and, while Dark Shadows isn’t without its problems, to get overly worked up about it doesn’t make much sense either.
Having never seen the late ’60s television show from which the film is based, I have absolutely nothing to add to that piece of the conversation. From what I understand there wasn’t any kind of comedy element to the show, which is something screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith (author of “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”) added to his adaptation and, as it turns out, is probably how the whole film should have been written.
In the picture Depp plays Barnabas Collins, an 18th Century playboy turned vampire. Buried by witch and scorned lover, Angelique (Eva Green), 196 years ago, it is now the early 1970s and Barnabas has been freed from his dirt nap, determined to bring the Collins family back to glory.
Dark Shadows explores the now-dysfunctional Collins family, lost love, revenge, small town values, etc. and to focus on it is a bit tiresome. The particulars only seem to be there to make way for bits of silliness and period set design.
Where the film does thrive is in its small nuances such as Barnabas’s dealings with his new surroundings. This includes not only his confusion over the advancements made in the nearly two centuries he was kept underground, but also a couple of the people. Most interesting of the bunch is Collins estate caretaker Willie Loomis (Jackie Earle Haley) and Helena Bonham Carter as the eccentric live-in psychiatrist, Dr. Julia Hoffman. Yet, even these moments are only good for a few chuckles.
As always with a Tim Burton feature, the production design is perfectly suited for the narrative. Burton’s usual dark tones are given life with splashes of color such as Bonham Carter’s white face against her bright orange hair and a splashy red dress worn by Eva Green. Danny Elfman once again provides an equal parts bouncy and mysterious score, which gives the film that all-to-familiar feeling. It’s a feeling of comfort and ease. You get the sense Burton could have made this film in his sleep and little thought went into putting it together, especially once you get to the entirely disappointing finale.
Looking over the list of credits and seeing Rick Heinrichs listed as production designer, I can’t help but wonder how much of what’s on screen is Heinrichs (who won an Oscar for his work on Burton’s Sleepy Hollow) and how much is Burton.
The question becomes, is Burton a director or a set designer? He doesn’t appear to be much of a storyteller and if it wasn’t for Bonham Carter I’m not sure any of his characters would be all that memorable. Carter has an exceptional talent for eccentricity and here, as in Alice and Sweeney Todd (to name a couple), she is excellent even if it’s only a small dose. Depp, on the other hand, is playing the same character in every film, though this time he mixes a little Bela Lugosi and Bill Compton to come up with his take on Barnabas Collins. Otherwise, the ups, downs, quirks and smirks are all the same and it has been some time since he’s had much meat to chew on in a Burton picture, Sweeney Todd being the lone exception in the last 17 years.
Since Mars Attacks! there have been a few Burton films I’ve enjoyed — Big Fish, Sweeney Todd — but those are the exceptions. The rule has become an expectation for mediocrity. Style over substance has never meant so much and it’s probably entirely appropriate the main protagonist in Dark Shadows is a vampire as a true soul and beating heart in Burton’s films seems to be missing more and more often.
