I
For "Alice in Wonderland", Depp losing himself in the role of the Mad Hatter: philosopher and teacher, author Lewis Carrol, caught up in the imagination and enchantment of a cosmos inhabited by the vanished innocence of Victorian maidens like "Alice" finding their way.
Teeny boppers growing up in the quest of their feminine destiny mirror their interior dialogue in the older man’s disguise..
The bachelor reciprocates..... finding himself in their motives and moments of personal discovery... the journeys coalescing , their fates playing out. .... .revelation hypocrisy inhibition mucho grande cannibalism yielding Oedipus madness
"Capito Clytemnestra? Vengence for Agamemnon? Electra, Orestes’s sister. Et tu Brute!"
II
Jackie Cooper and peg leg Wallace Beery as Long John Silver in "Treasure Island" money grubbing for Sir Alec Guinness’s gold bullion. "Lavender Hill Mob"
Spencer Tracy Lionel Barrymore Freddie Bartholomew "Captain’s Courageous"
Dickens "Pickwick Papers" "David Copperfield" "Oliver Twist" "Nicholas Nickleby "Bleak House".
"Where art thou "Madame Bovery?" Simone de Beauvoir’s "Second Sex?"
Victor Hugo’s "Les Miserables" and Frederic March as the haunted and hunted Jean Valjean....for kiping a loaf of bread.
III
The Bard’s own "Midsummer Night’s Dream," with Jimmy Cagney Olivia De Havilland Mickey
Rooney.. "What fools these mortals be" says Puck.
"We are the stuff that dreams are made on, our little lives rounded with a sleep?
At the Spanish Steps of Lord Byron Percy Shelley and John Keats...., on hearing Seiji Ozawa (74) diagnosed with cancer of the esophageal.... he the Red Auerbach of the Boston Symphony and Tanglewood for many a year......
Novella Roma, January 7, 2010
