"Dark Shadows" - 2012 - movie review

By the time I finally got around to seeing Tim Burton's "Dark Shadows" on Saturday night my feelings regarding the movie had come full circle. From ignorance of the project a year or so ago to excitement to wtf (when the first trailer did one of those LP scratching turn-arounds in mid flight) back to ignorance (of the willful kind) as the movie dropped completely off my give-a-sh*t radar.

The only reason I finally went to see it was because my Memorial Day Movie Marathon required I see something and Dark Shadows was about to start as I wandered into the multiplex. With my expectations so seriously dashed, however, I needed to adjust my attitude toward the project and try to simply take it at face value. So here goes.

First of all sitting through the film was less of a chore than I anticipated thanks to the fact that the humor was no where near a pervasive as the trailers led one to believe. In a broad sense what emerged from behind the marketing deception was a movie with tremendous potential totally undercut by occasional spasms of humor the film didn't need ("occasional" if you take the running gag of a 200 year old vampire in 1972 America out of the equation which was pretty easy to do since most of the film takes place in the very gothic mansion of the Collins family).

The first part of the film is a series of gorgeous foggy-night-by-the-colonial-seashore scenes where Johnny Depp's Barnabas Collins lays out his and his family's tragic history. Burton deftly creates an exaggerated colonial atmosphere any vampire would feel perfectly at home in. Then we jump to the modern era, circa 1972, and things take a turn for the unpredictable. The first sign that things are going astray is when Barnabas - having been turned into a vampire then buried alive by his scorned lover in the late 18th century - is accidentally dug up by a highway work crew and he spots a McDonald's sign glowering overhead. It's not even his reaction to it that causes the disconnect with the film's mysterious and promising setup, it's the very presence of that sign at this time that tells you Burton intends to deviate significantly from the source material.

From this point on right through to the end of the film the question in scene after scene becomes "will he play this one straight or attempt to impose some over-the-top humor on it?" Most of the time he plays it straight and in the process even manages to conjure up the bizarre greyscale mood of the tv series. Then he "cuts Johnny loose" and things fall tragically apart. Then he "reigns Johnny in" and things come back together, often spectacularly, then he "cuts Johnny loose" and, well you get the idea.

After a while I found myself experiencing a kind of PTSD as I was never sure if I could relax and just drink in the atmosphere or if Burton was going to undermine things and "cut Johnny loose". I don't know if I can remember another film that had the pendulum of my interest swinging so wildly to and fro, though Burton's second Batman film does come to mind.

Where Burton succeeds beautifully is where the makers of Men In Black III failed miserably; in recreating the past.  The look of any time, particularly any time in the past hundred years or so, is not a uniform thing but rather a collection of some things from the year being presented and many things from the preceding decade or two. Not everyone drove 1972 cars in 1972. Not everyone wore the style of the day or had furniture plucked from showrooms of the day. Most everything that was in the cultural mix of 1972 was leftover from earlier years, as is the case today. The only part of any year in the modern era that displays some form of homogeneity is media, print and otherwise, and people don't live in magazines, they put them on their 20 year old coffee table in front of the 10 year old sofa. The creators of MIB3 took their cues from the media of the times and as a result their 1969 looks little like 1969. Burton has done his homework however and his 1972 is utterly convincing.

So Dark Shadows looks great. Too bad all that effort wasn't put to better use. It could have been a true black comedy on par with "The Shining". The art direction was there, the sets, the actors even the director. If the humor had simply been toned down a couple of notches or toned down and tweaked juuuuust a bit toward the darker side of things instead of the wacky side I could have enjoyed this film immensely.