DON JUAN DEMARCO
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1995 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: Jeremy Leven's message is that a
groovy madness is better than a hard realism.
Miguel de Cervantes did it much better and Leven's
Don Juan fantasy is too much a burlesque to work.
Brando's performance shows not his expected
strengths but his perennial weaknesses as an actor.
Rating: low 0 (-4 to +4)
It is an old theme to juxtapose the cruel, real world with the seductive fantasy of a madman. Certainly that is the power of Cervantes's DON QUIXOTE. And there is some attempt in DON JUAN DEMARCO to capture some of the power of DON QUIXOTE or perhaps even the strengths of Anthony Harvey's THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS. But for such a story to work, the fantasy under-story has to be compelling. The Don Juan story of DON JUAN DEMARCO is less a compelling fantasy that captures the viewer and more a satiric burlesque. Lord Byron's near- epic poem version of the adventures of the amorous nobleman was itself intended to be a light social satire, perhaps no more compelling than CANDIDE. Jeremy Leven's screenplay takes three incidents from what was apparently the Byron version of the story. (He does that loosely, incidentally; Leven changes some of the character names and the island incident should have preceded the harem captivity. Also in the Byron, Juan's father died when Juan was a very young boy. Still, of the many versions of the Don Juan story, Leven seems to be basing his on the Byron.) But the story works only if Leven can make the reader wistfully wish the fantasy were true. There would be nothing compelling about a patient straddling the real world and, say, that of PEEWEE'S BIG ADVENTURE. Rather than having DeMarco's fantasies give resonance to his madness and make us want to believe them, they leave us with nothing we really feel like believing in either the sane or the mad world. It is one of several miscalculations novelist Jeremy Leven made in directing DON JUAN DEMARCO based on his own screenplay.
The story begins with Don Juan DeMarco (Johnny Depp) dressed in the clothing of a Spanish nobleman, but we quickly discover he is in a modern American city. He seduces one last woman and then goes to commit suicide for the love of the one woman he could not win. Psychiatrist Jack Mickler (Marlon Brando) talks him out of the suicide by playing along with the imaginings. When Don Juan is admitted to an asylum for ten day's observation, Mickler arranges to do the observing. There the doctor finds himself drawn into Don Juan's charming fantasies and finds that the young man's pleasant delusions transform his own life and his relation with his wife (Faye Dunaway).
Johnny Depp does a fairly good job as the seductive Spaniard, adding one more likable misfit to what is becoming a long list of such roles. Heresy Alert! Marlon Brando does as well as he is physically able to do with the role but it has been a long time since he has turned in a really good performance--in fact, forty-one years! Since THE WILD ONE, he has relied on his physical presence and his natural speech patterns, not unlike John Wayne. Today he is rotund, he lisps, and he is surprisingly in need of elocution lessons. Dunaway puts just a bit more edge in her role, but has no chemistry with Brando. It is unclear what it would mean to have chemistry with Brando in his current state. Bob Dishy is unusually restrained as the chief doctor of the hospital.
A gentle fantasy along the same lines could have been a very welcome film, but DON JUAN DEMARCO fails in the execution. I give it a low 0 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mark.leeper@att.com
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