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Before Oscar Wilde there was the Marquis de Sade, and before him
there was John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester. Johnny Depp’s libertine Wilmot
revels in his personal debauchery, a literal symptom of the "hangover" of the
seventeenth-century English Restoration. A century before, the Puritans had shut down
Shakespeare’s theater-mad Elizabethan England and imposed their spirit-suffocating
pietism for decades. Subsequent Restoration theater gloried in the profane and licentious,
most often taking the form of comedies. As The Libertine opens, it is 1760 London
and King Charles II (John Malkovich) has summoned the Earl of Rochester back to his court,
admiring Wilmot’s irreverent spirit and literary talents. Charles has not yet learned
to appreciate just how ardently the Earl burns his candle at both ends and in the middle,
or that he bites nearly every hand extended in his direction.
Stephen Jeffreys adapted the screenplay from his original play The
Libertine, and the resultant film has a markedly formal, proscenium-stage feel to it.
Seventeenth-century London lords and ladies walk, stumble, and fall in ankle-deep muddy
roads. Rain falls incessantly. Dark, smudged lighting casts deep shadows across many
scenes. The entire film is shot in dark, dank browns and grays. The effulgent wigs and
complicated garments people wear poorly cloak over fleas, lice, and a host of human
imperfections. The characters’ florid, hyperbolic, elliptical, punning manner of
speech rings true to the Restoration era, as both mirrored and modeled in the stage plays
of the day.
Mimicking Restoration drama conventions, the film opens with a
show-stopping prologue, in which the Earl repeatedly warns, "You will not like me
…and I do not want you to like me." In his outspoken anti-social stance and his
unrepentant profligacy the Earl embodies his beliefs, making himself, again and again, the
thorn is society’s side. (This libertine, like all libertines worthy of the name,
died of complications brought about by alcoholism, syphilis and other unappetizing habits,
in a state of complete social and physical ruin in his early 30s.).The second Earl of
Rochester was as much a self-constructed larger-than-life personage as he was a victim of
his own unbridled appetites. In all of this, The Libertine suggests comparison with
the writings of the Marquis de Sade and the Royal Shakespearean Society’s filmed
performance of Peter Weiss’s 1964 play Marat/Sade.
Also in both films, principles – such as personal liberty, freedom
of speech, and artistic license – function as characters as much as setting. As the
Earl of Rochester lives out the moral and social conflicts, he embodies them as well. His
personal and fortunes are summarized in the movie’s play-within-a-play -- the Earl
infamously provides entertainment for the visiting French ambassador with a performance of
Sodom
Along the way to his own early madness and death, Wilmot’s
profligate principles commingle with flesh-and-blood love interests. His wife Elizabeth
Malet (Rosamund Pike) epitomizes the graceful bearing of class, fulfilling her wifely duty
by loving him, even as he comes crawling back a diseased, dying shell of his former self.
Wilmot unleashes his brutal honesty on the struggling young actress Lizzie Barry (Samantha
Morton), whom he (sadistically) whips into shape, coaching her to be the greatest actress
she can be -- to be real and give her all in her performances. Like Wilmot, Lizzie
succeeds when she substitutes performance for real human connection. The rest is all
womanizing, scatological self-destruction, and a maddening, tragic internal blindness.
- Les Wright
