An Imperfect Enjoyment

The Libertine

The New York Sun, November 23, 2005

"The Libertine" is a fierce, intelligent, and compelling account of John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester (1647-80). It is also infuriating, not so much for what it is, as for what it could have been.

Perhaps this is inevitable. In the course of his brief, brilliant, dark shambles of a life, Rochester was a poet, a satirist, a wit, a lampoonist, a classicist, a thug, a drunk, a bully, a brawler, a hero, a coward, a lecher, a prankster, a kidnapper, a pimp, a penitent, a politician, an atheist, a jailbird, a courtier, an exile, and, curiously, an occasional importer of dildos. To describe - and explain - all that in two hours was never going to be easy, but, sadly, "The Libertine" (based on the 1994 play of the same name by Stephen Jeffreys) only covers the five years leading up to Rochester's death and never really tries to do so.

Adding to the sense of an opportunity missed, the movie makes little or no effort to show how the wicked earl was the perfect symbol of his torn, troubled age. Yes, with its startling juxtapositions of splendor and squalor, "The Libertine" skillfully portrays the uneven, unsettling, and treacherous surface of Restoration England, but it does too little to show the turmoil that lay beneath, turmoil that played no small part in making Rochester the man he became.

England in the 1670s was febrile, discontented, and restless, scarred by the recent civil war and unsure about what would come next. The monarchy may have returned after the collapse of a short-lived republic, but the old certainties had not. When the English revolutionaries decapitated the first King Charles, they also finally destroyed the idea that a king derived his authority solely from God. And if God's representative was no longer God's, what could hold society together? To the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (like Rochester, an atheist), the only feasible solution was an all-powerful state. To Rochester, the only possible response was "Who cares?"

His indifference extended far beyond political theory. With God a dead myth and the afterlife a shattered illusion, all that remained was to eke what enjoyment he could from an existence that was temporary, random, and pointless. Life was a joke, the punch line was savage, and the laughter hollow. Mr. Jeffreys's play hinted at all this, but the movie adaptation (on which he also collaborated) opts for disconcerting spectacle over troubling speculation, and the real inspiration of Rochester's wild ride is left in shadow.

Where the film does succeed, magnificently, is in its depiction of a man trapped in the obsessive pursuit of pleasures that only reinforced his self-loathing, rage, and despair and left him dead of syphilis at the age of 33. In the movie's deeply disturbing, hypnotic prologue, Johnny Depp's saturnine Rochester (another remarkable performance by this most remarkable of actors) warns the audience that we "will not like" him. It is just as clear that he does not like us. Nor, indeed, does he think very much of himself. His is a baleful vision, and it oozes the weary disgust that saturates the uncomfortable imagery of this bleak, demanding film. Rochester's circle of wits is made up of the corpulent, the malicious, and the grotesque, and his London is a primitive, merciless city, shot in drab, bleached, wan colors, where even the fittest are sick, and few survive for long.

These ideas descend into nightmare during the course of a scene inspired by Rochester's "A Ramble in St. James's Park," a poem of impressive obscenity that begins with the funniest two lines ever written on the subject of gossip - this is a family newspaper, so you will have to look them up yourself - and culminates in sour, desperate fury. A revolted Rochester is filmed stumbling through the mists, miasmas, and degradation of what was then London's naughtiest rendezvous (hopeful tourists should note that the park, these days, is not what it was). The frantic, rococo writhing, coupling, and who knows what is to Rochester yet another brutal reminder that you don't need God to make a hell.

But it's not all gloom, disease, and debauchery. "The Libertine" also offers a romanticized version of the liaison between Rochester and his teenage mistress, the actress Elizabeth Barry (Samantha Morton, in a rather earnest performance), that is part "Pygmalion," part feminist fable, and which conveniently manages to overlook its more, uh, mercenary aspects. To their credit, however, the movie's creators resist the temptation to apply today's dreary orthodoxies to the poet's relationship with the other Elizabeth, his wife, the Countess of Rochester (played to heartbreaking and aristocratic perfection by Rosamund Pike, a lovely actress so poised that she even brought a touch of class to last month's catastrophic "Doom"). While Rochester's girlfriends, boyfriends (oh yes, that too), mistresses, whores, and bastards put their strains on the marriage, the movie correctly leaves little doubt that the earl and his countess shared a real - and loving - affection.

This makes the cruelty of a critical scene in which Rochester humiliates his wife by refusing to stand alongside her for a formal portrait, posing instead with a monkey, all the more puzzling. So far as we know, Elizabeth never attended those sittings, and, typically for Rochester, the painting (it now hangs in London's National Portrait Gallery and shows him crowning a rather dissolute-looking monkey with a poet's wreath) was, primarily, a joke at his own expense. In Mr. Jeffreys's play, if not the movie, the artist understands: "Of all those bewigged men that I painted, bothering posterity with their long faces, he [was] the only one aware of his own absurdity."

On the whole, however, in terms of historical accuracy, "The Libertine's" sins are, unlike those of the earl, minor, mainly of omission, and usually excusable. Even if the idea that Rochester's farce "Sodom" was actually performed in front of an appalled King Charles II (a fine, louche, and cynical cameo by John Malkovich) is a fiction, it's a useful device to help illustrate the way in which the always complicated (and who does complicated better than Mr. Depp?) Rochester relished taunting the man who was his friend, patron, surrogate father, and, much more dangerously, monarch. It also gives "The Libertine's" director, Laurence Dunmore, an entertaining opportunity to demonstrate that there's more to British cinema's barnyard baroque than Ken Russell.

More seriously, the movie is too quick to pass over the intellectual, spiritual, and emotional drama of the poet's once-famous deathbed repentance. Right to his life's wretched, agonizing conclusion, Rochester remained trapped between the past and the future, teetering uneasily between the fear that there was a God and the terror that there was none, before finally toppling back into the faith of his fathers and the arms of his wife. Smug divines all over England were to celebrate the reprobate's return for decades to come.

And somewhere a monkey began to laugh.