the wolfman: alas, poor benicio

SPOILER ALERT

It's easy to understand why they thought of Benicio Del Toro when they wanted to remake the Wolfman; he's got that wonderful sort of feral cast to his features. And the transitions into beastliness are indeed a joy to behold, as is watching the monster in action, with its great, loping, superfast run. There's a lovely climactic battle between father and son werewolves amidst the symbolic inferno of the blazing family manor-house, and Anthony Hopkins does a superb job of creating a whole new character, by which I mean something rather different from what we've seen from him before (which seems impossible, since we've all seen him in 5,000 different things) (and, now I think of it, it may be only a personal effect, as I made a decision to stop watching his films some time hence), communicating his character well through broad but interesting brushstrokes. Anthony Sher is on hand to play a petty tyrant of a doctor who gets his own alongside a whole uber-talented cast of British journeymen character actors (sort of equivalent to having the Wrecking Crew backing you up on your record back in the sixties), including that guy with the great face from American Werewolf in London, the dart-thrower who says, "You made me miss. I've never missed that board before." He, also, meets a bloody but photographically interesting fate.

This, however, is just one further illustration of the rule against mixing Yanks and Brits in a single cast. The subrule is that Brits can meld into an American cast, but the opposite is rarely true. Yes, it's been done, sometimes with some success, but you must take very great care, because acting is like football: the Brits do it better than we do. Anyway, there's a certain kind of acting that we do better, but that's not the kind in play in this movie. Benicio is a huge talent, one of our best, but his skills lie in underplaying, eccentric humour, and improvisational naturalism. Here, those skills lie pinned and squirming beneath the combined weight of a massively stodgy script and an overweening production design. He's playing a successful stage actor born in England but raised in America, and from his first line, which, unfortunately, is, "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio...", it's apparent that he's in trouble: either out of his depth or in over his head, I'm uncertain which metaphor is apter.

The production design is a direct descendant from Coppola's Dracula, which is a film that I loved when I saw it the first time, completely abhorred when I saw it the second time, laughed at and enjoyed when I saw it again, et al, ad nauseam: the roller coaster never ends. Its flaws and achievements are all so bold that there is no tepid response possible, and it all depends much on one's sense of humour at the time of watching. Anyway, that one had an eerie sensuousness that was so over-the-top as to be occasionally magnificent (also it had Tom Waits eating flies; Coppola knows what we want), whereas this lacks anything so attention-grabbing. If anything, the sheer density of its arty atmosphere, that flag-waving, look-over-here insistence of it, makes you feel suspiciously like someone's trying to deflect your attention from the puniness of the storyline or possibly the dreariness of the dialogue.

Still, I am devoutly of the opinion that there can never be too many werewolf movies, and I applaud the effort to make the old-style, pre-Underworld, pre-Twilight, Lycanthropy-Is-A-Curse-Not-A-Form-Of-Sex-Appeal kind of howler.