The Nightmare Before Memorial Day

* 1/2  Dark Shadows. Written by Seth Grahame-Smith & John August. Directed by Tim Burton.

Eva Green wakes the dead in Dark Shadows, but not Tim Burton

One trick ponies don’t come less tricky than Tim Burton. For nobody, not even Scoobie-Doo, has gotten so much mileage out of gothic-horror pastiche. His career is studded with expensive stinkers like Sleepy Hollow, a woeful Planet of the Apes reboot, Mars Attacks! and Sweeney Todd, yet it lumbers ever onward, refusing to die. Burton mangled Alice in Wonderland, turning a delightful piece of literary whimsy into something even more “Narnian” than those bloodless, overblown Chronicles of Narnia movies; watch his 1985 Batman today, and his vaunted visual flair provokes little more than yawns. For the record, I liked Ed Wood, and I laughed now and then at Beetlejuice. But after a dozen misses in fifteen or so tries, it’s time to say it: Tim Burton is the most successful over-rated filmmaker in Hollywood.

            The story is much the same with his latest, Dark Shadows. Based loosely on the 1966-1971 spooky soap opera, Shadows promised to be a gothic fish-of-water story, with 18^th century vampire Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp)  reanimated in the ungodly year of 1972. The comic possibilities are rich: screenwriters Seth Grahame-Smith and John August get to give Barnabas a strange fascination with Erich Segal and the Steve Miller Band, and he gets to call Alice Cooper “the ugliest woman I ever saw.” Conveniently, all these laughs are in the trailer for us.

            Yet as happens so often in Burton’s films, Shadows can’t decide whether it wants to involve us, repulse us, or join us down in the audience for a laugh. Where the writers are content only to check off the required elements demanded by their screenwriting classes, the players seem lost in different movies. Chloë Grace Moretz, as the troubled teen, seems to enacting some kind of zombie bedroom farce; Jonny Lee Miller, as the creepy uncle, is not so much creepy as faintly unctuous. Depp, of course, is just the usual Depp, which is good enough for his kick-lines of fans, while the ravishing Eva Green (Vesper from Casino Royale) is in full Cruella de Vil mode. Mostly, it seems as if the actors received no direction at all. Burton appears to have been more interested in indulging his visual obsessions—think the Haunted House ride at Disney World, except more self-serious—than in little matters like script and performance.

            Not that there wasn’t a certain topicality to the premise. This summer not only Dark Shadows but Men in Black 3 will take us back to the first Nixon Administration. There’s a Jimi Hendrix bio-pic in the works, and Mad Men seems bound inevitably to end in the decade of earth shoes and wide lapels. It’s hard to explain the nostalgia, except that perhaps one of the most contentious decades in the 20^th century now seems appealingly quaint. But Tim Burton isn’t interested in any of that either. So little time, so many cobwebs to drape!

© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro