Dark Shadows (2012) **/*****

Tim Burton is one of the few directors who regular people actually know. Tell a regular Joe off the street that you’re going to see the new Tim Burton movie and they actually know what you’re talking about — which is something that can’t be said of many other more talented and more prolific filmmakers. That’s largely due to the fact that most of what Burton does is visual. He’s got his own aesthetic, easily identifiable from everyone else on the planet’s. All it takes is showing somebody a 20 second clip of a Burton movie and the sets, the costumes, and all of the production work is instantly identifiable to everyone.

For a long time that served him well. He married his own unique vision to scripts that were already inventive and original in their own rights, and the results were films unlike anything anyone had ever imagined. But then, after a while, the good scripts dried up. Burton found himself having to rely more and more on his bag of tricks to sell his projects, and his work started to taste stale, started to look cookie-cutter. The best thing about Dark Shadows is that it looks a heck of a lot different than anything else Burton has ever done. He seems to have built an entire 70s era fishing village in order to bring his vision of Collinsport to life. And though there’s a sprawling, decrepit mansion at the center of the film, it’s not the abstract, Cabinet of Dr. Caligari set piece that you might be imagining. It’s intricately detailed and resembles a gothic castle, but it doesn’t look like a “Tim Burton” gothic castle, if you know what I mean. Seeing the director turn his attention to detail and sense of whimsy toward different targets felt like a huge breath of fresh air, and it gave me immediate hope that Dark Shadows would be the movie to end his string of subpar efforts.

Heck, even the soundtrack pulled me in from the beginning and assured me that this movie wasn’t going to be like any Burton project I had seen before. We open our story proper on a girl named Victoria Winters (Bella Heathcote) getting on a bus and heading off to interview for a governess job at a mysterious mansion named Collinwood, while The Moody Blues’ ‘Nights in White Satin’ plays over the scene. I never really realized that ‘Nights in White Satin’ was a badass song until I heard it played in this context, and this wasn’t the last time I found myself responding positively to Burton’s popular song soundtrack. There are several song choices used throughout that don’t just establish the era the film is set in (the early 70s), but they also establish and augment the emotional tone of their scenes. Seeing as he usually just relies on a dark and fantastical Danny Elfman score to set the mood of his films, I’ve never thought of Burton as one of those directors who could put together a really effective soundtrack. It felt nice to see him showing off another talent after giving us the same old for so long.

Unfortunately, the visuals and the soundtrack sum up everything that impressed me about this movie. From top to bottom, everything else about the production reveals an unfocused, uninspired mess of a film. As many already know, Dark Shadows is an adaptation of a mystically themed soap opera that aired for five years from the late 60s into the early 70s. It focuses on the Collins family, a brood that comes from old money who established the Maine fishing village of Collinsport as their home base of operations generations ago. Their patriarch, Barnabas (Johnny Depp), is a mysterious, dashing figure… largely because he’s a vampire who’s lived in the town since the very beginning.

That’s just the very base level of what this movie is “about,” though. To get further into everything that happens over the course of the film would take some effort, because there are a ton of characters, a ton of subplots, and I’m not certain even those responsible for the script (mostly Seth Grahame-Smith) could tell you which ones really matter. The storytelling here is just putrid. There’s no build, no structure, and no purpose to anything that happens. Watching Dark Shadows is a lot like listening to a rambling child make up a story on the spot; it’s clear they have no idea where things are going, and the chances that they’re actually going to get anywhere are pretty dang slim. We have a large, dysfunctional family (each member of which have their own secrets to keep and journeys to make) living under a roof together, a witch (Eva Green) who’s plaguing them with curses because Barnabas spurned her affections two centuries ago, a tale of two fishing companies competing for dominance over the seas, and an Alice Cooper performance that comes out of nowhere.

There is one plot, about the house’s new governess resembling a lost love that the evil witch took away from Barnabas many years ago, that seems like it’s probably supposed to be the heart of the film — but it suffers because it keeps getting interrupted by all of the other intersecting plot threads. It’s hard to tell an effective love story when you’re also trying to explore a teenage girl’s anger, a young boy’s fixation on his mother’s death, a father’s inability to put others before himself, an aging psychiatrist’s fixation on youth, a groundskeeper’s battle with alcoholism, and that damned Alice Cooper performance that went on for so damned long. The Victoria character tells us that she loves Barnabas, that she’s finally found her home at Collinwood, and that she’s the happiest that she’s ever been — but we never watch her grow happy, we never see what she’s responding to so positively in Barnabas. I guess we’re just supposed to assume it all happens off camera. Consequently, there’s nothing about this story that gets its hooks in you, nothing that propels you forward; and it doesn’t take long for things to start getting boring. By the time a mid-air, room wrecking sex scene happens between Barnabas and the witch character, it was clear to me that the movie was a stupid mishmash of “wouldn’t it be amusing” ideas that would never congeal into a coherent story, and I started to tune out.

And by the time the film’s ludicrous climax occurred, I had tuned out completely. Nothing about this movie would lead you to believe that it was building to a big, comic book action climax, but it gives you one anyway. And it’s awful. Green’s villain is wacky and cartoonish, none of her actions or motivations make any sense or play as having any weight. So it’s kind of hard to care when everything comes down to a physical confrontation between her and Barnabas. And seeing as the rules of all her witch powers are never established, we go into the film’s ending having no idea what she can and cannot do. We don’t know how dangerous she really is, what it takes to hurt her, or if she can really be hurt at all. Consequently, the whole thing plays like arbitrary nonsense. Before Dark Shadows reaches its peak it’s mostly a pointless and boring experience, but after we see where everything goes (and realize how much of it goes nowhere) the film ranks right down there in the mud and muck with all of Burton’s other recent, lazy efforts. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice in Wonderland, Dark Shadows… throw them all in a big pile of soulless remakes that exist for seemingly no reason and light them on fire.

Let’s be honest though, the main attraction of all of Burton’s modern works has been the involvement of Johnny Depp. You probably can’t write a review of this movie without discussing how he does in the lead role. Once upon a time Depp was one of the ballsiest, most experimental actors working in Hollywood, and he inexplicably got rewarded for his efforts with huge mainstream success. But, in recent years, he’s become one of the most predictable actors who gets regular work. Ever since The Pirates of the Caribbean made as much money as it did and his character of Captain Jack Sparrow became an enduring part of our cultural tapestry, Depp has relied on some variation on that spaced-out but fast-talking character to keep the dollars rolling in. The only differences between his performances from film to film over the last decade have been what kind of wig he’s wearing and what sort of makeup he’s sporting. The good news is that Depp’s go-to character is an entertaining one that lends even the most mediocre projects moments of entertainment; so he can probably be pointed to as being Dark Shadows’ strongest element. The bad news is that Depp is on borrowed time with his current persona, and unless he does something interesting and new pretty dang quick, I can’t imagine his star power will continue to shine as brightly as it does right now… and that goes triple for Burton.