Tim Burton has never been great at "story" anyway and Dark Shadows is no exception. The plot is overly complicated and enormously repetitive, boiling down to this: the evil witch Angelique (Eva Green) and her ex-lover the vampire Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) have been at odds since the 1700s. Centuries later they still lust-hate each other and battle for the soul (and fishing profits) of the village known as Collinswood in the 1970s. As weird as it may be to say, "In the 1970s" is the important part of that sentence. Burton hasn't cared much about storytelling since the 90s when he made his two best films (Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood). As a director he's always relied on his own peculiar aesthetic as the movie. His gothic cutesiness has grown so successful it's now a calcified brand which he can transport with ease (and a hundred million plus budget) to just about any property for a Burtonesque remake.
So the real question with each new movie is whether he's throwing a good ball or "happening". The answer changes from scene to scene.
Burton can still deliver a great visual hook as he does here with a recurring ghostly reenactment of a woman's hypnotic "suicide". These visitations are beautiful and haunting but the film's climax would play far more impactfully if we had pieced the details together for ourselves and felt the tragedy with an engaging "a ha". He can also still deliver whimsical comedy as in one fine bit when Barnabas' self-pitying dramatics actually cause the scene's chintzy musical accompaniment. But even in the film's best moments there's a certain clumsiness in the play and inertia in the pacing as if Burton is caught between his new laziness and his old genuine excitement about his chosen material. Is it a comedy, a tragedy, a melodrama, or a horror film? Burton doesn't know so the actors try to hit all the targets with entertaining but mixed results. Helena Bonham-Carter and Johnny Depp "get" Tim Burton (as well they should) but their elaborate characterizations feel more effortful and less funny than the movie needs. Even the gloriously welcome Michelle Pfeiffer (come back to the movies full time anytime, diva), moves with a certain careful stiffness through her regal, funny and winning big screen return as the Collins matriarch. Chloe Moretz fares worst with the one note role of the sullen teenager. Two years into her ubiquitous teen stardom she's still burdened by her youth, all pose and no deeper feeling. That's fatal in a Burton film where deeper feeling is the only thing that will differentiate you from the elaborate human statuary just out of focus behind you.
Only Eva Green, who also played a witch in The Golden Compass, moves through the gorgeously gothic set and preening 70s affectations with the freeness of inspiration. She's all quick spins, rump slides, and bosomy pride as unwaveringly sure that she owns the movie as Angelique is that she owns the town. Her freakish rictus grin is the perfect cap on the star turn: comedy, tragedy, melodrama and horror all at once. Green also earns the movie's best and most inventive visual effect, her skin-deep beauty cracking like the shell of a hard boiled egg…without the egg inside. She's never been human enough.
In the end Dark Shadows doesn't cast any of its own. Its mild successes and failures shine no bright light on the director's future (even though the final image is all "Can I be your sequel, please?") If Burton continues to make movies as terrible as Planet of the Apes and Alice in Wonderland, Dark Shadows will be a minor uptick in his creative downslide. If his imagination finds a second wind or purpose, Dark Shadows might well be remembered warmly as a turning point… the moment he stumbled back toward the light.
Catwoman and Burton finally reunited.
Nathaniel Rogers would live in the movie theater but for the poor internet reception. He blogs daily at the Film Experience. Follow him on Twitter @nathanielr.
