A Legendary Lover, Brought Down to Size

Casanova

The New York Sun, December 23, 2005

New Mexico, August 2016  © Andrew Stuttaford

Even his name, Giacomo Casanova, with its lovely rhythms and hint of a sigh, sounds like seduction. Try saying it without smiling as you savor the memory or, more precisely, the legend of this trickster Romeo, bogus aristocrat, and genuine original, a man (perhaps character is a more appropriate word) about whom nothing was ever quite as it seemed, but who deserves better than the lame, preachy mess that is Lasse Hallstrom's dreadful new movie.

To start with, Mr. Hallstrom's "Casanova" fails miserably in its attempts to be sexy, which is, given its subject matter, a remarkable achievement, roughly akin to making a gladiator movie without swords, togas, or thumbs down. Secondly, with the exception of the occasional merciful interlude, usually involving the splendid Oliver Platt, it's simply not amusing: an embarrassing fault in something billed as a comedy. And while we're on the subject, Mr. Hallstrom, Mack Sennett is dead: Pratfalls are no longer funny.

All this is bad enough, but the greatest disappointment is that this Casanova is never allowed to be Casanova. The opportunity to represent the weird, wild, and, all too often, imaginary "real" life of a man more interesting, challenging, and bizarre than anyone encountered in this movie is wasted. The historical Casanova's confused, and confusing, shifts in identity ought to resonate in our own era of experiment, paradox, and uncertain attachment to the notion of objective truth. They ought to, but in this film they are not given the chance.

What we are subjected to instead is a plodding morality tale saturated with the Hallmark treacle and dismal contemporary pieties that ensure that "Casanova" will one day find a natural berth on television's Lifetime channel. To cut a short story shorter, after a few feeble twists, twitches, and turns of what passes for a plot, Casanova loses his heart to Francesca Bruni, an annoying protofeminist played by Sienna Miller, who is much more than one "n" away from being a believable Italian, let alone a feisty thinker centuries ahead of her time. It would, I suppose, be too much of a spoiler to reveal whether the legendary libertine finally succumbs to the questionable pleasures of monogamy, but, suffice to say, the real Casanova, who once announced that marriage was "the tomb of love," is now rolling around in his.

That's not to say this movie is without its pleasures. Reasserting his heterosexual credibility after the recent cowboy interlude, Heath Ledger is charming in the title role, a pleasure to watch, and a fine leading man, but slightly too young, hugely too nice, and way too uxorious to be convincing as the brilliant, complex, and cynical charlatan that he is meant to be playing. For better Casanovas, try Vincent Price's cameo in Bob Hope's ludicrous "Casanova's Big Night" (yes, really) or, if dim memory serves me well, Frank Finlay in the BBC series from the 1970s. Oliver Platt, meanwhile, ever the vaudevillian, steals every scene he appears in as Paprizzio, the lard king of Genoa, and Jeremy Irons doesn't come far behind. He does his usual saturnine thing with his usual saturnine competence, this time as Bishop Pucci, an agent of the Inquisition who combines Clouseau's skills with Beria's charm. Naturally, a beautifully filmed Venice, the Garbo of cities, does its usual thing, both as exquisite backdrop and, in its gorgeous, mysterious way, as an essential protagonist in the drama that unfolds.

And the overwhelming sense of this film as an opportunity missed is only sharpened by the occasional tantalizing hint that its makers did indeed have some idea of the enigma that explains (yes, yes, along with all that sex) why, more than 200 years after his death, naughty, elusive Giacomo remains a scandal, a legend, and an enchantment. In one clever scene, Mr. Hallstrom's hero ambles unrecognized by a puppet show dedicated to his purported exploits and rumored intrigues. It's a sly, effective reminder, reiterated in a different way later on in the movie, that the man was not the myth. It's a nice touch and one that the old rogue, writing his unreliable memoirs in the Bohemian castle that was his last refuge, would have appreciated.

Those memoirs, the extraordinary creation of a man who was, ironically, in all other respects a failure as a writer, have done more than anything else to make the idea of Casanova what it is today. Beginning with the fake, vaguely aristocratic, name that Casanova added to his own on the title page, they are a hilarious, disturbing, shameless confection of fact, fantasy, fiction, recollection, confession, philosophy, pornography, wisdom, stupidity, and mischief that throw history off balance and leave morality who knows where.

And as they do, they introduce us to the man that Mr. Hallstrom overlooks, to the man who became Casanova, rake, romantic, con man, entrepreneur, gambler, cleric, spy, jailbird, magician, snob, rebel, and so much more, or, perhaps, so much less. As for Casanova, he simply claimed, more than a little disingenuously, that the joke was on him: He wrote about Casanova to "laugh at myself" and, he said, he succeeded.

Mr. Hallstrom's "Casanova" would have reduced him to tears.