At Wit's End
The convoluted plot of the new 'Pirates' should leave all a-bored
By Andy Klein
Jerry Bruckheimer's no fool: If the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie made twice as much money as the first by doubling certain qualities of the story and the style, then by all means double them again for the third. Which means that Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End is even noisier, more frenetic, more pointlessly complicated, and - God help us - longer than its predecessors. There is so much classic Bruckheimer bloat here that he could have called it Arrrrrr-mageddon.
Where to begin?
The new edition's opening sequence is - from certain angles - the most provocative and interesting in the film. The colonial government hangs seven people, including a 10-year-old boy, while pronouncing a series of repressive "emergency" measures, including the suspension of habeas corpus. It's a more direct dig at the Bush administration than anything in 28 Weeks Later: The rhetoric is quite directly from the War on Terror playbook, with the word "terrorist" replaced by "pirate."
The actual story kicks off with Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) and Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) brazening their way into the lair of Singapore-based pirate king Sao Feng (Chow Yun-Fat). They either strike a bargain or don't; their meeting turns into a fight with the arrival of either Barbossa's men or the authorities or Davy Jones's men. (The dull fight choreography engenders - dare we say it? - Malay melee malaise.) They go off to either rescue Jack (Johnny Depp) or free Bootstrap Bill Turner (Stellan Skarsgård) or defeat Jones (Bill Nighy) or help him or invite him for a fish fry or something.
Twenty hours later, I don't have a clue about any of this. I'm not sure I did even as I was watching. And, before you start e-mailing heartfelt, concerned condolences over the apparent epic destruction of my brain cells, rest assured that I consulted numerous viewers on the way out, and none of them had a clue either.
We're not talking about richly ambiguous complexity here, but rather about the impossibility of understanding the damned plot, of following the story as it unfolds. Who's on whose side? Which group in any given fight are we rooting for? Who are those swordfighters? Are they Jones's men? Or Elizabeth's allies? Or students from a floating fencing school that just happened to drift by?
You'd have to take that confusion, double it, square it, and multiply it by Jerry Bruckheimer's net wealth, to adequately characterize the tangle of ever-changing supernatural rules that govern the film's internal mythology. Do we or don't we want someone to stab Davy Jones's heart? Just who, precisely, is dead here? And what does death mean in a context of repeated reanimations and metamorphoses? Can anyone in the audience really keep track of the whole system? And if not, why should anyone feel engaged?
Perhaps it is one of these ever-changing laws that might explain why, in the climax of the final battle, one major character suddenly freezes up at a crucial moment of decision. None of the characters around him seems to understand why; and neither do I. But that's "how" the good guys win.
Then there's the multiple plot reversal problem. About the fourth time you discover that (for instance) Jack is a good guy who is only pretended to be a bad guy, who had been pretending to be a good guy, who had been pretending ... (insert infinite loop here), well, frankly, who gives a damn?
The script is no more than an endless procession of such plot developments and supernatural elements. Director Gore Verbinski - who has been known to do good work - attempts to overcome the story's innately listless confusion by cranking everything up to 11. For nearly three hours, it's as though he's shouting from the screen, "Isn't this fun? Isn't this exciting?" to cover up the fact that it is, in fact, neither ... as though hectoring the audience will somehow brainwash them into thinking they're having a good time.
The paradox is that, if that strategy works, then I guess they are having a good time. And who am I to deny them that? It's the triumph of conditioning and visceral response over artfulness. If pranksters hypnotize you to think shit tastes like filet mignon, shouldn't we just let you wallow and swallow? Bon appetit! Who needs chefs? Or grocery money?
There is one major way that the new Pirates doesn't continue the aesthetic arc of the first two. The last one was even more of a comedy than the first, resorting to both high and low physical humor. At World's End seems deliberately conceived not to be nearly as comic as its predecessors. There is the occasional funny line from Depp or Rush, but that's counterbalanced by the ordeal of listening to Knightley delivering Pirates's debased equivalent of the rousing St. Crispin's Day speech in Henry V. Wasn't it bad enough making us sit through that kind of inspirational gibberish about liberty and posterity and sacrifice in Braveheart and 300? The last good version of this shtick was John Belushi's speech in Animal House; and that was nearly three decades ago.
Besides Bruckheimer and Verbinski, the main culprit in this cavalcade of audience abuse is composer Hans Zimmer, who, after roughly a hundred scores in 23 years, has yet to compose a melody that outlasts your walk to the parking lot. Bruckheimer could have saved a lot of money and ended up with better music by hiring John Du Prez to expand the little pirate pastiche he composed for The Crimson Permanent Assurance segment of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.
Depp, Rush, Nighy, and some of the others manage to deliver a few amusing moments, but even the protean Depp can't come close to the delight of his work in film number one. In general, the performances are hard to judge, because it's impossible to understand huge swaths of the heavily accented dialogue. Chow
Yun-Fat has never grown truly comfortable with English, Naomie Harris seems to be channeling either Rosalind Cash in Buckaroo Banzai or the young Eartha Kitt, and Rush is taking his cues once again from Robert Newton's Long John Silver.
Still: Why was it sometimes hard to understand Knightley and Depp? Could a production of this scale actually have substandard audio work? So much exposition is garbled that it may have been a deliberate strategy, so we wouldn't notice that NONE OF WHAT THEY'RE SAYING MAKES ANY DAMNED SENSE.
It would be unfair to suggest that there are no decent minutes among At World's End's 168. Keith Richards shows up for about three of them, and, while his presence is briefly distracting, it's also strangely affecting. It's not so much a matter of performance as it is his face - one of the most lived-in in the world. There's about 150 years of hard living writ there, and it gives his countenance a depth and melancholy the film does not deserve.
Published: 05/24/2007
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