Dark Shadows: Burton / Depp Paint-by-Numbers

Why must it always be vampires?

I am jealous of my friend Sean, who was blissfully unaware of the context for Dark Shadows. Having seen only the posters, and not knowing of the television series upon which it was based, he assumed that Tim Burton was finally releasing his masterpiece: a gothic Royal Tenenbaums about a weird family doing odd, Burtonish things. Then he saw the trailer, and like the rest of us, let out a sigh of defeat. Not just at the existence of yet another vampire film, but also at the first of this summer's weird time travel epics (Men in Black 3 going back three years earlier to 1969), and of course to this latest in a long line of Burton/Depp pairings that provide ample evidence for why that professional bromance deserves a break.

The good news is that Dark Shadows has its share of pleasant surprises. The bad news is they are only surprises.

Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) was cursed to become a vampire in the late 1700's by a jealous witch (Eva Green) and then imprisoned. Released in 1972, he returns home to find his family and their ancestral home of Collinwood in ruins. As he attempts to rebuild the family, he must face the roadblocks of internal family strife as well as the persistent advances of the witch Angelique who has spent the last two centuries taking revenge on the Collins family, either from blind rage or from a unrequited love of Barnabas. With a vampire and a witch fighting for their immortal souls, the sleepy coastal town of Collinsport is caught in the crossfire.

From the start, let us acknowledge that the absolute best thing about this film is, again, the only real compliment you can pay to Burton's directing efforts post-Big Fish: It's super pretty. Production design, lighting, composition… it's all on display, in every frame of the film. And, unlike Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Alice in Wonderland, the smaller scale allows for such a decrease in CGI and dependence on practical sets, it almost feels like a return to classic Burton films like Beetlejuice, where so much of the eerie joy came from the immersion and belief of the possibility of a tactile sense. Which serves this movie to no end. Barnabas fetishizes every square inch of the family manor, so watching him run bony fingers along stretches of immaculately crafted artwork brings a genuine warmth and connection to the set.

It's a shame then that no such connection can be formed to any of the characters or performers. I'm the first to admit I keep throwing money at seeing Depp play Depp, but this decade of his performance has soured me to such a degree I fear I've reached the end of my patience. Knowing how the Barnabas character from the TV show influenced him as a child, and how this was such a pet-project, I'd hoped for some new breakout role. Or at least a change up. No, dear reader; prepare thyself for a blood-drinking Captain Jack Sparrow, for that's all you're in for.

Johnny, you're so much better than making wide eyes while poking at the scenery. Stop it.

Michelle Pfeiffer gives a pretty excellent Elizabeth Collin Stoddard and Helena Bonham Carter was… appropriate as Dr. Julia Hoffman, but the remaining cast of Jackie Earle Haley, Chloe Grace Moretz, and Johnny Lee Miller are almost completely squandered; Miller so much that I feel you could edit out all of his scenes and it would have little to no impact on the film. Most criminally, Bella Heathcote as Victoria Winters is used to set the narrative framework for the entire film, given a mysterious backstory and supernatural edge, then almost completely abandoned for the next two and a half acts. She functions as little more than scenery until the finale, where a major turning point becomes little more than…

You know what? It's a mess. The whole thing is a mess structurally. But you know what deserves credit? The compacting of thousands of episodes from one of the bulkiest TV series in history, and one that itself was a giant narrative mess, into a two-hour run-time. If you ever watched Dark Shadows, you know it seemed like borderline live television, as the soap-opera had a daily schedule, leaving both the production and the story very ramshackle; so much so that actors often played multiple characters, or characters were played by multiple actors. This isn't like adapting The Beverly Hillbillies or The Adams Family; this is like adapting a long-running UCB show into something with emotional weight. So I'll count small victories on an adjusted scale.

Based on the trailers, I dreaded a fish-out-of-water schlock comedy, as the ads seems to center around Depp being puzzled by 1970's technology and culture. Thankfully, these instances were few and far between, and in rare occasions genuinely funny. Instead, the film's primary tone is much more dramatic. I'm sure many audiences were disappointed by this, sold on their attendance by a parade of Depp reaction shots, but the serious moments succeeded in creating a watchable, fascinating story. Unfortunately, in juxtapose to near slapstick sequences of supernatural love-making, it just creates an emotional fugue leaving you to guess whether the next scene should be taken at face value or is a wink to the crowd.

There's a lot of awkward laughter from small patches of the audience. That's what I'm saying. And not in the way that these are inside jokes, or a more cultured viewer is getting a different experience. Rather, no one seems to be on the same page as to how the film wants to be read at any particular moment. So guess and check?

Dark Shadows isn't a bad film, nor a terrible adaptation, but it doesn't know what it wants to be and it should not be your job to make that decision. I've enjoyed it better than most Burton films in recent years, and there are moments to be appreciated. I cannot point to a single instance of Danny Elfman score, although his name was listed prominently in the credits, so again, it's difficult to not see the entire experience as the paint-by-numbers Burton/Depp exercise we've grown the expect.

The central thesis it proclaims is "Family is more valuable than wealth," but in addition to consistently undermining this value set in character choices, including a finale in which Barnabas seemingly gets what he wants at the expense of all around him, the movie itself can't seem to accept its own premise. Maybe it is comprised of Burton's filmic family, but the content seems more geared towards the least common denominator and a bottom line, instead of the honesty of love. Whether intentional or not, Dark Shadows' existence seems to prove itself wrong.