Johnny Depp has always been passive. In his early films – Edward Scissorhands (1990) or Benny and Joon (1993) – he had the delicacy of a mime, a beautiful blank slate crying out for stylised emotions. Later, in films like Dead Man (1995) or What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1994), he was always the still centre around whom things happened. That’s the trouble with his career-changing role as Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: Depp made Captain Jack another of his introvert outsiders, seemingly acting in his own private world – and his own private movie – but the film’s success misled Hollywood into thinking of him as proactive. Watching him try to be an action hero in something like last year’s Alice in Wonderland was painful, and a total misunderstanding of what he does best.
In that sense, his performance in The Tourist should be a blessing: as Frank Tupelo, an American tourist in Italy, Depp is passive with a vengeance. He seems downright slack-jawed, almost simple-minded. Even his facial hair seems limp and ill-fitting, as if pasted on with paper glue by a 5-year-old. Picked up on a train by assertive femme fatale Angelina Jolie, he can only gape as she commands him to invite her to dinner (then corrects his wording when he does so). Never mind speaking Spanish to amused Italians – who dismiss him as a stupid American tourist – he can’t even speak English. “You look ravenous,” he tells Jolie as she stands in front of him in her evening gown; “Do you mean ‘ravishing’?” she asks gently.
Depp is basically a comedian, but Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck is not. FHvD, possibly the director with the longest name in movie history – I can’t think of many other contenders, except little-known 30s journeyman Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast – made his name with The Lives of Others, a film not renowned for its light-hearted tone (or lightness of touch), and doesn’t seem to know how to play Depp’s passivity. The actor needs a director who can see the human comedy in his wide-eyed innocence – Jim Jarmusch in Dead Man came closest – but FHvD is too prosaic for that; Frank just seems like an idiot, and Depp appears to be on auto-pilot. Jolie, too, has little to do except look classy – she wears gloves, a cream-coloured dress and a red ribbon, her coiffed hair falling down her back in a lush cascade – and speak with a British accent, while Steven Berkoff plays a stock villain and Paul Bettany skulks in the background as Inspector Something-or-Other.
In a way, that’s no problem. The Tourist is designed as a lark, a divertissement; it’s supposed to be loose and relaxed. The plot – everyone thinks Depp is Jolie’s husband, who’s wanted by both cops and gangsters – is deliberately flimsy and FHvD adds jokey detail, like a comical interpreter. A rooftop chase is tweaked by having Depp trying to outrun pursuers while in his pyjamas. But this kind of thing needs a certain nonchalant style, and the film just doesn’t have it. It seems slow and sluggish, and when real emotion breaks through in the second half – the couple suddenly caught in a dance, or Depp crying “I love you!” as her boat speeds away – it doesn’t convince for a moment.
Much of The Tourist is just lame. When Berkoff kills an unsuccessful minion in between trying on a new jacket, he joins a (too-)long line of icy supervillains who Will Not Tolerate Failure. The use of smoking as a symbol for ‘being a man’ is too obvious, not to say dubious. The climax tries too hard – why do we even need the shooters barking for permission to “engage”? – and the twist at the end is disappointing. When will Hollywood realise these flashy Big Twists only succeed in being illogical? An ending where, for instance, Frank used his maths skills (he’s a maths teacher) to open the safe with some complicated probability theorem would’ve been more traditional but a lot more satisfying.
“It seems like everything this year was three-dimensional, except the characters in The Tourist,” wisecracked Ricky Gervais in his infamous Golden Globes monologue last week. This is unfair. You don’t need rich characters in this kind of action-comedy romp, in fact they get in the way. But you do need flair, wit and an air of sophistication, and you need a sense of humour about your hero. Otherwise he just seems … well, passive.
