On Johnny Depp's Mortdecai

I recently caught Mortdecai on cable--and found the film a pleasant surprise. Enough of one that I found myself remembering the severity of the critical hostility to it when it came out, and speculating about why they went so over the top in bashing the movie.

I suppose a significant reason was that the movie starred Johnny Depp, over whom the entertainment press has fawned, but against whom it turned years ago, to a ludicrous degree, with one predictable result the excessive bad-mouthing of anything he appears in. (Actually watching Pirates of the Caribbean 4, or The Lone Ranger after hearing their moaning and groaning, that excess was very clear.) That fact aside, the movie was a January "dump month" release of an adaptation of which many of the critics, and their audiences, likely knew nothing (a now comparatively obscure British comic novel of the '70s). This did not invite hostility the way Johnny Depp being in it did as leave the film vulnerable, with the same going for other aspects of the movie--its simply having no lobby in the commentariat that might attack detractors on some political grounds.

I might add that the film's retro aspect, its subtle evocation of something yesteryear, its working in the style of a kind of comedy they do not make much anymore--there were comparisons with The Pink Panther, and they were totally on the mark--probably did not serve it well with the less cinematically literate critics, perhaps especially because of what may have been the most unexpectedly Pink Panther-like aspect of the film of all, Depp's performance as the titular figure, Charles Mortdecai. What Peter Sellers did with the French detective Jacques Clouseau, Depp did with his British aristocrat. I thought it worked brilliantly, and having since read the first of Kyril Bonfiglioli's Mortdecai novels, think it was entirely fitting.

But I suspect the joke went over the heads of many of those critics who thought this "strange," for reasons extending beyond cinematic illiteracy to idiot snobbery. A certain sort of American--and the kind who become film critics for upmarket review pages tend to be so inclined--seem to hear Received Pronunciation, and hear in it their social and intellectual superior, if not their Lord and Master. (This is the sort I suspect bizarrely turned the stale Heritage drivel of a Conservative peer of the House of Lords who came into the Kitchener name via marriage into a cultural phenomenon in the United States.) Seeing such a figure depicted thus was bewildering to them, and perhaps even offensive. A less stupid person, however, would not have that reaction.