Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

The Libertine is a costume drama about a man who acts like a pig because, in his view, we're all pigs - and to pretend to anything different is hypocritical.

John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester (Johnny Depp) is a 17th-Century Howard Stern, Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt all rolled into one. He has a tenuous relationship with King Charles II (John Malkovich) - who admires Rochester's keen intellect but cannot abide his perversity. He has an even more tenuous relationship with his wife (Francesca Annis) - who has learned to put up with her husband's dalliances - with Ale and the Inn - but cannot stomach his latest fascination: The theater. Watching the audience hurl their contempt at actress, Elizabeth Barry (Samantha Morton), Rochester sees something else in her, something he falls madly in love with: a wretched honesty that might move the world if it only had the right direction. He doesn't want to sleep with her - though he probably will. What he really wants is to bring out what he sees in her, so the whole world might see it, too. The development of her potential is more intoxicating to him than sex.

Somewhere along the way - most likely during one of the movie's more obnoxious orgy scenes - my wife turned to me and asked the kind of question distributors have been asking: Why would anyone want to sit through something like this? In fact, though the film was released in the U.K. in Novemeber 2005, it took another four months to release it in America - and if my hometown is any indication, it's a film that will be seen on one screen for every fifty-mile radius.

Much in this film requires a strong stomach. The dialogue itself would be considered pornographic in most communities between the coasts - what some folks call Jesus Country. That's without the intimate sex scenes, which aren't graphic enough to be porn, but are loathsome to look at, even through blue smoke and mirrors. That's also without the images of actresses circling a stage with giant phalli, scenes of Johnny Depp jamming his digit into secret places, and then licking it off - and a host of other tidbits that make sex as appealing as a mudbath in a pigpen.

That, I suspect, is the point. To my knowledge, nobody ever called himself a "libertine." That was an insult hurled at the Anabaptists (the forerunners to the Baptists of our day) by Jean Calvin, who resented their decision not to baptize infants into the fold (the Anabaptists considered it a mockery of the ritual to conduct it on an infant who could no more profess a faith in Jesus than get up and dance). It was a term later hurled at rationalists, deists, Free Thinkers and others of a "libertarian" nature, who rejected all attempts to marry church and state - especially when it made the former more political and the latter more pretentious.

This is a film full of excess, lovingly applied with a paint roller. It begins with a soliloquy (perhaps appropriately, since the film is an adaptation of a play, championed by John Malkovich, which was inspired by his performance in Dangerous Liaisons). That soliloquy runs what must be eight or ten minutes in length - just a talking head that won't shut up. That some of the lines are quite good is buried beneath the exhaustion of staring at that face, shot in gritty, low-light film stock - giving us perhaps a more realistic cinematography but one as grainy and hard to see as Jabberwocky.

It takes an actor as popular as Johnny Depp to play a part this unlikable. In fact, the film, itself, is book-ended between brutal frankness and sarcasm, between the warning, "You won't like me" and the question, "Do you like me now?" As played by Deep, Rochester is a nobleman bored with the pageantry of the age, and particularly with its dual choices: traditional piety - supported by the Church - and the rationalism of The Age of Reason. To a man like Rochester, both choices are the same choice, in different clothes. As popes, bishops and priests began to be replaced by mathematicians, scientists and engineers, certain things were not changing - mainly the nature of man, which is neither sinful nor rational. Man, as Rochester, saw him, was a creature of appetites and passions, neither of which should be suppressed in order to advance the species to a false sense of itself.

There's a very telling scene, involving the perfunctory portrait-painting of a noble and his lady. As the Earl of Rochester and the Countess pose for their portrait, she is expectantly regal. He, on the other hand, is supremely miserable. He even calls for a monkey, because he sees the two of them as nothing better than trained monkeys, performing tricks for a human zoo. All of this pretense, for either social or political purposes, ignores the reality of what men and women are doing when they think no one is watching.

Which brings me back to the question my wife raised - about who, in the audience, really wants to see a film like this. This is a film, like Quills, Valmont and Dangerous Liaisons - or The People versus Larry Flynt - which celebrates deviancy as containing at least a seed of something the human race will need to survive. From a storyteller's perspective, it makes sense that a film about a cynic would be told from his perspective. Every perspective, no matter how eccentric, makes sense within a certain context. But some perspectives are harder to justify, which is probably why we won't soon see Milosevic: The Movie.

Had it wanted to, The Libertine could have done that. If Oliver Stone can make you feel sorry for Nixon, if Woody Harrelson can embody the humanity in Larry Flynt, if the movie, Max, can expose us to a view of Hitler - or a moment in his life - when we'd actual feel sorry for "the little corporal," anything is possible.

But to pull that off is no easy feat. Spike Lee did it for Malcolm X, by taking nearly an hour to show the world Malcolm Little grew up in. More often, though, there are cries of foul play, that history has been airbrushed. In the politics of Oscar season, some criticized A Beautiful Mind for not including John Nash's homosexuality, including his arrests. Sir Richard Atenborough's image of Gandhi, according to some, tried so much to paint him as a saint that audiences were left uninformed about Gandhi's dark side, a puritanical obsession that drove some contemporaries away.

Nothing of the sort could be said about The Libertine, which lays its cards on the table, face up. Warning the audience, "You won't like me," Rochester spends most of the film's 114 minutes proving the point. To be sure, there are "pet the dog" moments, when Rochester engages in behavior that is redemptive in nature - including his intervention in a nobleman's prosecution of his servant. Learning that the servant (whose name I can't repeat here) stole from his master, Rochester pays off the debt (like a little Jesus), then hires the servant to go out and spend a bag of gold, partying with prostitutes. When the man returns the next day, even Rochester is surprised to discover what a loyal servant he has become - not through beatings but through basic understanding of how the human animal really works. At a time when Montesquieu was explaining the Enlightenment idea of checks and balances, Rochester was proving that appetite, not reason, is what motivates the human soul. When the servant returns, he explains why didn't just run off with the gold: "You're the kind of man I want to work for."

That, I suppose, is what makes Rochester a 17th-Century Anton LaVey, creating his own Church of Satan, but without either a website or a flair for organization. Rochester is a one-man church of hedonism, or at least he expects to be. But can hedonism, alone, explain his actions when he chooses to push the experiment in a variety of directions? I don't want to give away too much. I'll just say that this Earl of Rochester is an interesting character, if you have the stomatch to watch his story unfold.

But whether you will or not is a difficult bet. Rooting for the bad guy isn't thoroughly un-American. Except in Georgia, we aren't a nation descended from prisoners, like Australia, but we are a nation of tobacco growers, slave traders, pirates, gun-runners, moonshine distillers, and who knows what else? Most of those who braved the dangers of either the Pacific or the Atlantic came because they didn't have a better reason to stay in Europe or Asia. Our history books include the lesson of Prohibition, both as an example of our religious ideals as well as proof that you can only go so far before such reforms are mocked and ignored by the masses.

It helps when there's a strong feeling that the rules are oppressive. Take three films from the eighties - Risky Business, Ferris Buehler's Day Off and Home Alone. In all three, there are strong reasons for a sudden sense of liberation. Tom Cruise is air-jamming Bob Seeger in his underwear because his parents are gone - and they represent the pressure to achieve. Matthew Broderick plays hooky - in style - and admits that what he's doing is "a little juvenile, but so is high school." Macauley Culkin, upon realizing his wish has come true - and his family has disappeared - can only jump up and down with absolute glee. But to understand this, you'd have to see his family, which left him behind after making him skip dinner and sleep in the attic.

In film, as in sword juggling, timing is everything. The Libertine would have a better chance of being accepted if it had a clear target, in contemporary pop culture, to rail against. Dangerous Liaisons, for example, had the benefit of coming off of the innocence-gone-awry of 80s life, not to mention the growing discomfort of sexual politics. Quills also had the benefit of blasting P.C., and the boy-scout politics of the Clinton Impeachment. When there's a clear source of frustration or oppression, a film can vent this by linking itself with the public's desire for freedom.

The Libertine doesn't do this. It doesn't try to justify Rochester's cynicism, except with camera shots of muddy roads and ugly sex. It begins with a soliloquy straight out of the play, but doesn't give us a strong reason to hate the king or fight the Church. It expects us to "get" Rochester's cynicism, as if he were Hannibal Lecter or the Marquis de Sade. But even those characters, in Silence of the Lambs and Quills, had a visible context to rebel against. Without such, Rochester just comes off as a kook. He's not an urban playboy, enjoying his share of sexual adventure in London town. He's an addict, obsessed with a crotch cannon that never quits. Like all repetition, the sordid details of his exploits grow increasingly less appealing as they're multiplied ad nauseam.

The irony of it all is that neither Stephen Jeffreys, who wrote the play and the screenplay for this story, or Laurence Dunmore, who directed it, want to take someone as eccentric as Rochester and cut him to fit a balanced account of his life. They can't help but aspire to be true of their subject, by making the film as excessive as the rating system will permit. Some of that excess - including a play within a play, involving a gigantic phallus ridden by a midget - is genuinely funny, if only as a novelty (provoking audience members to say, "I can't believe they did that"). The rest, however, is just bad moviemaking - whether we're talking about soliloquys that ought to pay rent, dialogue that is atrociously vile, sex scenes that are winceably nasty (rather than erotic) and gross-out make-up artistry that turns authenticity into a weapon.

This is not a film for the kids, nor is it an evening of entertainment for the weakkneed, weak stomached or weak of heart. It takes patience to watch, in all its grainy gloominess. On the other hand, there are revelations of character that are far too good to pass up. If you can sit through the grit without feeling you're watching porn, you'll see Oscar-worthy performances delivered by John Malkovich and Samantha Morton - not to mention Johnny Depp.

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age