This past week, I engaged myself in a re-watching of three of the most popular adventure films of recent years: Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. What started out as a goofy-sounding movie based on a theme park ride turned into one of the biggest pop culture phenomenons of the new millenium. And two of the films, at least, are damned good movies, blockbuster entertainment at its best. They are movies of excrutiating complexity, with many themes, messages, and subplots crammed into their near-three-hour running times.
The Curse of the Black Pearl hit theaters in July 2003. It wasn't expected to be a whole lot worth mentioning, just a dumb summer flick based on a dubious premise, in spite of a cast featuring stalwarts Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush and Jonathan Pryce, and up-and-coming stars Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley. But then something happened, and it became a huge hit. How did this come about?
This is a rather easy question to address: Pearl is a relatively simple film, all around. Not that it doesn't contain its share of themes or ideas, but for the most part it's a grand old adventure film (albeit with a supernatural twist), relatively formulaic (in a good way), featuring a well-structured story, interesting characters, and lots of great scenes of action and spectacle. We have a plethora of enjoyably archetypical characters: the straight-laced romantic hero Will Turner (wooden plank Orlando Bloom), feisty heroine Elizabeth Swann (pre-bitchy Keira Knightley), nasty villain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), stuffy English naval officer Norrington (Jack Davenport), Elizabeth's doting Father (Jonathan Pryce), and of course, Jack Sparrow (Depp). There are lots of great action scenes (including two of the best sword-fights outside of an Errol Flynn or Douglas Fairbanks film), nice visuals (particularly Elizabeth's first encounter with the zombified pirate crew), a stirring, instantly classic score by Klaus Bladet, a sharp, witty script by Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio (who actually had time to develop this project, unlike the sequels) and a nice, typically happy ending. The film's a mite overlong but all things considered, it's a forgivable sin.
Perhaps the biggest asset of Black Pearl is Johnny Depp. He gives us a wonderfully eccentric creation in Jack Sparrow, one of the great film characters of this century so far. Looking like Keith Richards with eyeliner and dirty dreadlocks, mincing like a drunken drag queen, acting like a more fey version of Eli Wallach's great Tuco from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, spouting off a never-ending succession of (largely ad-libbed) quips and non-sequiters, Depp easily steals every scene he's in, and our nice but wooden leads don't stand the slightest chance. He's a charming rogue, an extremely unscrupulous schemer who always finds the most convoluted and improbable ways of getting out of trouble. A question frequently asked in these films is: "Do you think he plans it all out, or just makes it up as he goes along?" Trying to decipher Jack's motivations and unwind his tangled machinations is ridiculously fun. The rest of the cast is adequate-to-good - Geoffrey Rush in particular makes a fabulous, teeth-gnashing yet sympathetic villain, and Jack Davenport is quite good, as his portrayal of the complex Norrington throughout these films will remain truly refreshing and enjoyable - but this film, at least, is Depp's show from beginning to end. Only sporadically in the sequels would Jack reach such a glorious level of irreverent entertainment; this is the original, and by far the best.
So, we have everything sweetly tied up at the end. Jack has his ship back, Elizabeth and Will are together, and Norrington and Swann seem reconciled to that fact. The End. Unfortunately for Will, Elizabeth, Jack, and the rest, Curse of the Black Pearl was a huge success, so they couldn't be left off in a state of never-ending fictional bliss.
The two Pirates sequels are quite interesting in their own way, with their own flaws and rewards, and seemingly in a completely different universe than their simple-minded predecessor. While Dead Man's Chest is a pretty lousy movie barring a few good scenes and admittedly neat visual effects, At World's End is an intriguing film, a sprawling bit of excess that manages to entertain and fascinate even while inspiring a huge degree of incredulity. The latter two movies contain loads of sub-plots, side characters, which simultaneously help and harm the films in question. The phrase which leaps to mind is glorious mess - or, at least it's glorious in the case of one of them.
Dead Man's Chest is a failure for a variety of reasons. Despite a brilliant opening ten minutes, with Elizabeth and Will's wedding interrupted by the arrival of the evil Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander) and his henchmen (in the midst of a swirling rain storm), and Jack's intro shooting a crow through a coffin lid, the movie never quite decides on what it wants to be. It is by far the darkest of the Pirates films, with Lord Beckett's omnipresent henchmen consolidating power (for nefarious purposes of imperialism and - gasp! - capitalistic enterprise) and more pertinently, the lengthy scenes of Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) and the fishy, undead crew of the Flying Dutchman (well, they would be dark and scary if they didn't look so ridiculous). Too much time is spent setting up the plot, with Macguffins and backstory that are either discarded or contradicted later on. Other than Norrington - interestingly reincarnated as a drunken wastrel, his career in tatters after his unsuccessful pursuit of Jack - our heroes from the original story are pretty much ciphers. Even Jack barely gets to do any scheming, and he ends being a rather lifeless and unfunny cipher, rather than the interestingly complex, cunning rogue of the previous film (and what the hell is with his flirtation with Elizabeth?). The action scenes are mostly lame, degenerating to the Looney Tunes level - the whole ridiculous, excrutiatingly long (and mostly pointless) scene on the cannibal island, and the three-way swordfight on the spinning water wheel. There's no fun to be had here, only dizzying exposition and aggravating incredulity. In the end, the only level on which Dead Man's Chest works is as a set-up for the finale.
At World's End, on the other hand, is a refreshing return to form. Although a mite overlong - the inexplicably surreal Davy Jones' locker scenes, with the multiple Jacks and thousands of rock crabs, are just as long, boring and stupid as the cannibal scenes in Chest - and schizophrenic in tone, with an excrutiatingly convoluted story and fifty-six different subplots that don't always tie together or get resolved satisfactorily (the whole bit with the pirate council comes to very little, and Chow Yun-Fat's much-hyped part is a glorified cameo), it manages to succeed on the level of pure entertainment, which is where it most counts. It starts off with a really dark and nasty opening - Beckett has gone Liberal Caricature of George Bush and is executing thousands of people without trial, including ugly little kids - a very amusing juxtaposition with the Disney logo with When You Wish Upon a Star playing. The rest of the film doesn't live up to that tone, but if there are too many gags with monkeys and midgets, and too much going on, and poor use of supporting characters, and too many implausible and occasionally unsatisfying moments, they're swept under the rug for a lights-out, no-holds-barred super-giant wowser battle scene that is one of the most visually stunning and intense sequences you'll ever see in a PG-13 Disney film (wait, that's a much more back-handed complement than I'd intended). And, here's something - Captain Jack is back to being entertaining.
If nothing else, the two Pirates sequels are complex to a fault, and they worth discussing in some detail. They carry a number of intriguing themes and ideas, even if all of them aren't satisfactorily dealt with, and I shall indulge my inner film student with a half-baked analysis from here-on. There are many aspects of these films we could analyze, but realizing this article is already half the length of War and Peace, I'll restrain myself to a handful of issues, ennumerated below...
One of the most interesting themes of the film is that of Man vs. Nature. All wrapped up in the mythological implications of Davy Jones, Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris) and their ilk, most critics seem too eager to connect Jones to the old seafaring legends and stories rather than say what they actually stand for. Jones lost his humanity through his relationship with Tia Dalma, mutating into a laughable CGI monster with a caricature Scottish brogue, and now his heart is literally out of his body. His crew, trapped between the two worlds, sails the seas with impunity, unleashing the vicious Kraken whenever they see fit to kill a few people for jollies. When Jones arrogantly proclaims "I AM the sea!" he may not be speaking the literal truth, but he is certainly a force of nature far beyond the control of man. Dalma is the sea goddess Calypso, and is an even more overt representation of Nature. Beckett may gain control of the
Dutchman ("The immaterial has become immaterial"), and the Bretheren Court might control Calypso (or at least the terms of her release), but both learn the hard way that all this achieves is inviting punishment and revenge. Man can try and control Nature, but failure is inevitable - and doing so only incurs its wrath.
Less discussed by reviewers than Jones is Lord Beckett, brilliantly portrayed by Tom Hollander, who represents a number of interesting themes. At first, he appears to be a fairly typical bad guy - arrogant, calculating, British - but as the film(s) progress, he develops into an interesting symbol, if not character. On a basic level, Beckett functions as a physical manifestation of imperialism (represented by the huge world map painted on the wall of Beckett's office, and later a Chaplin-esque globe in his ship's cabin) and capitalism - a huge company, under the guise of patriotism and progress, expanding its monopoly around the globe with callous regard for human life, only concerned with profit and personal gain. (Hmm... nope, no political message there.) More interestingly, he is also a dark analogue to Jack Sparrow - their shared past and different paths afterwards point to this, and their meeting in At World's End shows them to be, effectively, mirror images of one another. Both men are skillful at manipulating others, in order to save their own skin and advance their means. But the chummy, scraggly, witty and cunning Jack represents freedom, an idea completely antithetical to the clean-cut, cold, and conniving Beckett, who represents imperialism and macroeconomics. Why critics don't seem to pay much attention to Beckett (and the wonderful David Schofield as his glowering "clerk" Mercer) is beyond me, but I guess they were too distracted by Squidface Nighy and his briny crew. Critics.
Therein lies the central conflict of the films: freedom. Jack makes a point of this fact in the original: "A ship represents freedom." In spite of the best efforts of Norrington, in Pearl the Caribbean was still pretty much a wild, raucous place where one could be a pirate and have lots of fun plundering, looting, and otherwise being a criminal. The likes of Beckett, however, want none of it: power and control are paramount, along with a rigidly structured society. Jones has forfeited his own freedom, allowing himself to be controlled by whomever owns his heart. Jack has to make this choice, too, being forced to confront the ultimate question: Is it worth living forever? And how free would one really be, in that instance?
This is all interesting on a thematic level. Unfortunately, some rather clunky attempts are made, in End at least, to connect this with our global situation and the dummy currently residing in the White House. Elizabeth's embarrassing Braveheart-esque speech in End spells this out, treating piracy like an unfairly maligned liberal movement rather than a bunch of cut-throats (a dubious proposition, to be sure). To be fair, though, the Bretheren Court does come across as a slightly more violent version of the UN, with lots of pointless bickering and argument among selfish world leaders that leads nowhere...
But really, reading political subtext into this is rather foolish, even if Elliot and Rossio (both active Screenwriters Guild members) frame the issue in this way; the theme ressonates on a much more basic level. The ultimate dream of a pirate, at least according to these films, is not to plunder and rob and amass a fortune, but to be able to sail the seas, unfettered and alive, forever. This has been the appeal of piracy in fiction, from Treasure Island to Captain Blood to, well, these films: the dreams of being able to live outside of the constraints of society and do your own thing, heedless to rules and laws and the like. Elizabeth is our representative on the spot (at least in Pearl): eager to burst free of the controlling, stuffy society she inhabits, and to experience the world of unmitigated freedom and enjoyability. And she gets to live her fantasy (and ours), getting kidnapped by pirates, managing to escape at fight them off, and being rescued by her Prince Charming in the process. This what not only these movies, but films period, are, in their purest sense - being able to live a fantasy, in a much more direct sense than one could with novels or story-telling.
So, yeah, there is some actually depth and content to these films. But mostly, they are (or should be) for fun. That's why Curse of the Black Pearl is the best, and why At World's End is infinitely better than Dead Man's Chest. As armchair film critics, themes and ideas might appeal to us. But as pop-corn munching theater-goers, we want action, adventure, likeable heroes, hissable villains, cool special effects, a satisfactory climax, and a few good jokes along the way. Adding plots of Dickensian complexity to our fun swashbuckling adventure isn't something that most viewers appreciate, and it doesn't really help the movies that much, save for the purpose of articles like this. Quite frankly, it smacks of self-indulgence as much as anything else. The effort to make these films deeper than something like Die Hard is admirable, but how seriously can you take a movie with zombie pirates and squid-faced sailors anyway?
No, Pirates of the Caribbean are top-notch fantasy films, not political screeds or classic novels. As such, they're pretty darn entertaining. But sometimes less is more, and in this case, Curse of the Black Pearl definitely trumps Dead Man's Chest and At World's End.
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