ohnny Depp’s mesmeric performance as 17th Century poet John Wilmot is never the inglorious cockfest it threatens to be, despite the sneering straight-to-camera prologue which promises us just that. Unless filmed without the director’s permission, it proves a shrewd opening, immediately unsettling and increasingly effective. We are urged to envy and desire Wilmot, but never to like him. This request is easily fulfilled early on. He proves a foul, lecherous scoundrel, whose erectile pomp seems wasted on whores and beggars. However, Depp’s skilful depiction of the cynic’s detestful human condition and unbound intelligence searches deeper, and finds something, cowering in the shadows.

Wilmot’s suicidal attempt to embarrass rather than glorify his patron, Charles II, is an act of rebellion, which calls to mind that of Satan. This likeness to Paradise Lost carries throughout the film, potently in Dunmore’s hellish rendering of London as a drunken flesh-infested tangle of virus and limb. Wilmot’s sense of injustice, of being banished, like Satan, from the King’s kind favour, for merely expressing the spirit given him, manifests itself in both a constant arch-cruelty and a vitriolic self-abhorrence. “I myself am hell,” speaks Satan, a neat wrap which could have slipped seductively from Wilmot’s own cynical lips. When scolded for his alcoholism by his mother with the claim “anyone can drink!”, his slow-tongued reply, “I doubt that many can match my determination for it” is a resigned realisation of his destiny. Like Satan, he is both betrayed and entranced by his very spirit and the tragedy of his isolation slowly takes hold.

At the opening of Mr. Arkadin, Orson Welles tells the story of the frog and the scorpion: the scorpion begs the frog to take him across a vast pond. The frog refuses, on the understandable grounds that the scorpion will sting him at his first opportunity. The scorpion reasons that if he were to do so, both would drown. The frog, accepting this as a logical position, takes the scorpion across the pond. Half way over, the scorpion duly digs his sting into the frog’s back. The frog asks him, in the face of his own clear reasoning, why he did it, “it’s in my character” replies the drowning scorpion. It is this devastating loyalty to himself which drives both Wilmot and the film. He simply cannot bend, humorously displayed when posing with a monkey, instead of his wife, in a family portrait because he finds it “more interesting.”


Like Ralph Fiennes’ portrayal of Onegin, The Libertine explores the pain of living. Both Onegin and Wilmot are men who cannot feel. Whose disconnectedness with their own world leave them stranded, seemingly unreachable. Yet both men are touched and consequently destroyed by a beautiful woman. Wilmot becomes obsessed with Elizabeth Barry, an actress whom he inspired to greatness. His reasons for doing so uncharacteristically lay beyond a backstage fondle. He merely wishes to vicariously enjoy her ability to feel. However, like Onegin, he is ultimately too far adrift to find his way back. Both men hobble into obscurity, alone, finally unable to reconnect.

It must be Malkovich’s ill-fitting prosthetic nose that helped him sniff out his first decent role in years. Although his accent occasionally slips into that of the wormy aristocrat, he portrays the King with an air of fatal ridiculousness and ineptness that lifts him beyond cameo. Visually, it’s pleasingly murky and mucky. The music-box score is intrusive, sometimes giving the earlier scenes the feel of an extended fragrance ad, although in 17th Century London the fragrance is likely to be the whiff of genital rot. And likely it is to come from Wilmot’s syphilitic walking corpse. It is a neat narrative trick, and a cruel realisation of our own jealousies, to find that we only warm to Wilmot once he is fatally stricken. His last, grandstand public effort should not be written off as a compromise. Wilmot saves Charles II from being picked apart at the House of Lords with an incorrigibly heroic speech. His gold-plated false nose, twisted limbs and partially devoured face seem to momentarily disappear. Yet, we should not believe that this is an act of repentance, merely a final display of his manipulative powers.

The Libertine extends itself further than the flourishing quill with which Wilmot’s own literary works were penned and even further than his other “well put around” instrument. The film’s momentum slows to a near stop in the last twenty-minutes, as Wilmot’s own physical powers fade, breathing in its own bad air, without ever losing control. Johnny Depp can only be admired for once again creating the laws of gravity that the rest of the film must obey, for better or worse. Wilmot, finally, is a man who dreams of abduction. We are told that any experience worth having “will be carved out at your own expense,” and if at times The Libertine feels it is takes more than it offers, it all seems worthwhile during the moving epilogue, Wilmot provocatively beseeching: “do you like me, do you like me now?” Ultimately, and to the film’s credit, I really can’t decide.