At Voice's End: Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and the Shrieking of Keira Knightly

I thought Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest was a big, noisy mess.  It was one hour of set-up for the third movie, an hour more of advertisements for the video game, and about twenty minutes of its own movie.  But my main complaint was that it wasted Bill Nighy in the role of Davy Jones.

Well, not in the role, but in the make-up.

Why in the name of all that's unholy would you cast Nighy, with that wonderful, long, sad slab of a face of his, and then cover it up in eight layers of prosthetics and a million bytes of CGI work?

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, this week's feature for Mannion family movie, answers the question.

Because, Lance, when you're all done you've still got Nighy's eyes and Nighy's voice to work with.

I wouldn't put his performance up there right next to John Hurt's in The Elephant Man, but if there's another actor who's done a better job of acting through what amounts to a complete mask other than Hurt I can't think of him or her. 

Boris Karloff?

At World's End is an even bigger and noisier mess than Dead Man's Chest, but it has more minutes of actual story and offers the actors much more opportunity to actually act, which is unfortunate in at least one case, which I'll get to.

I don't understand, though, who the filmmakers thought they were making the movie for but it sure wasn't the same audience as the one that made the original a hit.

At the beginning they seemed to be aiming for that hitherto untapped audience of Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weil fans.  At other points they were courting the Pan's Labyrinth and The Fountain crowds, folks who like their romance and adventure with a large dose of the macabre and grotesque, not to mention the gruesome.  There's stuff in World's End for fans of Phantom of the Opera and for fans of Das Boot, and one rather creepy "comic" interlude apparently put in for fans of the American Pie franchise that features leering pirates looking up Keira Knightley's skirt.  Mainly, though, with the variations Johnny Depp was doing on his Jack Sparrow persona, the movie seemed to be chasing Depp fans who look upon his turns as Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood as his best work still.

And the second to the last scene between Elizabeth and Will on the beach may have thrilled many of Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom's fans who have passed through puberty since Curse of the Black Pearl, but I'm sure it confused the ones who are still kids.

"Why is he kissing her knee, daddy?"

I want to see that scene recreated animatronically at Disney World.

But for all its being a weird mix of styles and genres, At World's End could have been a rattling good pirate yarn if only director Gore Verbinksi had noticed that Keira Knightley can't do loud.

She can't do tough either.

Anger she can handle but only when she doesn't have to be loud and tough at the same time.

She's at her best when she does merry, but none of the Pirates movies have given her much merriment to do.

And yet, while giving lots more opportunities to act to Depp, to Nighy, to Bloom, to Geoffrey Rush, Tom Hollander as the villainous Lord Beckett, and even Kevin McNally as Jack Sparrow's first mate Gibbs, what the script gave to Knightley was far too many opportunities to shout.

Actually, everybody but Depp and Hollander, and Jack the Monkey, is required to do way too much shouting, but it seems as though Knightley must have had the same stage direction at the beginning of every one of her lines in the script---(at the top of her lungs).

Knightley just doesn't have the voice for shouting.  She doesn't have the voice for yelling, screaming, hollering, calling, crying out, or, for that matter, speaking in tones much above that of a euphonic burble.

When she tries to do any of these, she winds up always doing the same thing.

Shrieking.

Gave me headache.

From the pained expression on her face throughout all the movie, except for that scene on the beach when she was allowed to do sexy and a little bit merry, I'd say it gave her one too.

Maybe someone could cast Bloom and Knightley in a remake of Captain Blood.  Olivia de Haviland never had to shout to be tough or angry or sexy.

Comments

[Jaquandor]

I'll have a post sometime soon about how much I loved these two movies (Pirates 2 and 3). Seriously, I thought they were just grand. Loved 'em.

[Lance]

Jaquandor,

Love ya, man, love your blog, I have great respect for your taste in movies, and I'm looking forward to your post on Pirates, but you also liked Phantom Menace!

[actor212]

another actor who's done a better job of acting through what amounts to a complete mask other than Hurt I can't think of him or her.

Eric Stoltz in, errr, "Mask"

[Uncle Merlin]

YES, a big noisey mess. I turned it off and went to bed at the point they were carving out Will's heart! YUK!

The first one was stupendous, the next two were lost on me. I just watched for Jack and even then he was lost to me because of all the extraneous hoopla going on without any relation to a plot. Take the pirates meeting at the table, what was going on there? In fact they introduced Jack's dad so obliquely I almost missed it had I not known who was playing him. I point this out because in the trailers and mags last year this was made into a big point who would be playing Jacks' dad. What was it 2 minutes on screen with a vague reference to mom?

No,it didn't hang together in my opinion. The action left the plot and never came back to it. I would wager each scene in this movie was made by comittee and there was a new comittee for each scene. That's how disjointed it appeared to little ole me.

M

[Marc G.]

Unfortunately, it appears that there was one trilogy;

PotC: Curse of the Black Pearl
PotC: Flag of Tortuga
PotC: No Quarter Given

and then, in a parallel universe, there was this other trilogy;

PotC: Pieces of Eight
PotC: Dead Man's Chest
PotC: At World's End

but somehow they got mixed up. Stupid dimensional rifts.

[Jaquandor]

ove ya, man, love your blog, I have great respect for your taste in movies, and I'm looking forward to your post on Pirates, but you also liked Phantom Menace!

Yeah, but not unreservedly, I point out!

[actor212]

PotC 2 wasn't half bad, but you got the sense they had to scramble for some plot points.

PotC 3 did scoop up a lot of the loose ends of the first two (and if you didn't stay for the easter eggs at the end of the first two, you were probably halfway lost already), but added so much stuff...well, let's put it this way: in acting classes, we can always tell who didn't do the work from the fact that they'd speed up their lines and actions so much that you could barely follow them. They'd shout but not scream, speak fast but never clearly, and their hands would whizz around the set.

Depp struggled mightily to find some new insights in the Jack character, but sadly...no.

[Batocchio]

As a Brecht fan, I'm not quite sure that's what they're going for, although when I heard Rossio and Elliot speak most recently, I may have missed it. ;-)

In general, I'm not a fan of movies that go for the big spectacle finale, so large that it loses characters. CG spectacles are the biggest culprits.

I also completely agree that Knightley is utterly unconvincing as a badass. That's one of the points I'm hitting in my forthcoming movie roundup.

[Exiled in New Jersey]

I suspect Verbinski and company did not want to go the way of Lucas and the original Star Wars trilogy....for letdowns, none was worse to me that watching those final scenes stolen from Gunga Din, or the whole film which, once they had gotten Han free from Jabba, became a recycling of themes replete with stupid Ewoks. The funny thing about that trilogy is that the middle episode was by far the strongest, and could stand on its own without the other two.

Seems to me Pirates began to go downhill as soon as Lord Beckett was introduced to the plot in #2; his 'evil' was something far too heavy for the 'let's make a pirate movie' crew that filled #1.