Johnny Depp is fairly amazing in “Waiting for the Barbarians.”
A strong casecouldbe made that he is amazingly bad, if you overvalue things like realism. But don’t do that. Instead pay attention to the way the movie wakes up whenever he appears, and that it’s difficult to take your eyes away from him, or to stop noticing and pondering what he’s doing onscreen.
Depp plays a sadistic police colonel, working on the outer edges of “The Empire” — probably the British Empire at the turn of the last century. This weird, stiff-mannered, artificial character seems an expression of the unnaturalness of the political situation.
Do you ever see some completely ghastly, destructive, delusional politician on TV and think, “This guydoesn’t even know who he is?”Deppis playing that sort of guy, only an operatic version, someone so encased and marinated in lies that he is beyond the reach of thought, reason or emotion. He is, in all human senses, gone, and yet he’s in power.
“Waiting for the Barbarians,” available to stream starting Friday, Aug. 7, is a strange case, in that its principal performances are superb, and yet most of the movie is dead onscreen. At the center of it isMark Rylance, as the magistrate of this imperial outpost. He is an older guy, a career officer, just trying to do his job and not hurt anybody, and then one day Colonel Joll (Depp) shows up on a tour of inspection and makes everything horrible.
Joll tortures a “barbarian” man to death, forces confessions and blinds a young woman who won’t falsely testify against her father. One of the nice, dreamy touches of the film is that the barbarians are unspecific as to race or region. They’re non-white, butotherwise they can be anything. In that way, the movie becomes a commentary on colonization, in general.
Does this sound like a good movie? It sure does to describe it, and since movies exist not only in the moment but also, afterward, in the mind, that must be taken as a plus. But in the experience, the film is deadly slow and uneventful, with brilliant scenes bursting to life, here and there, like roses in a wasteland.
“Waiting for the Barbarians” is based on the book of the same name by J.M. Coetzee, who also wrote the screenplay. And that might be the problem right there. Would you want to be the one to tell the winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in文学,他的剧本是如此无聊的计谋ld sedate an elephant? I wouldn’t, because he might reply, “Actually, the problem is that you’re a moron.”
But some brave, impervious soul should have broached the topic (director Ciro Guerra,for example) because most of “Waiting for the Barbarians” is simply unsuited to that which we call “the movies.” Indeed, you could fast-forward through at least an hour of this 102-minute movie and miss nothing essential.
One more performance must be mentioned, however, and it’sRobert Pattinson’s as an officer in the imperial police force. He plays a man who’s younger than Depp’s colonel, less sick and less impenetrable. But he’s old enough, sick enough and hard enough. It’ll take him a few years, but give him time; someday he’ll be a monster, too.
L“Waiting for the Barbarians”:戏剧。马克•里朗斯主演,约翰尼·德普和长袍rt Pattinson. Directed by CiroGuerra. (Unrated. 102 minutes.) Available through video on demand starting Friday, Aug. 7.