Don Juan de Marco

Another of the movies that showed up on one of the streaming services was one I knew more for the hit song it spawned and because it came at the end of a famous star's career than for the actual movie itself: Don Juan de Marco. Having watched it, I can now do a review of it for all of you.

Johnny Depp plays the titular character, who at the start of the movie is getting dressed up in a Zorro-like mask, although as you might be able to guess from the title, it's really supposed to by Don Juan, the great lover, or at least one of Don Juan's descendants. Since he's referred to as Don Juan de Marco for most of the movie, that's how we'll call him in this post. Anyhow, after getting dressed up, he goes to a fancy restaurant to meet a woman. However, the real purpose is to tell the woman that he's going to commit suicide.

How to stop a young man from committing suicide by throwing himself off a ledge? In Fourteen Hours, they tried to use a policeman to talk the man down, but here, it's considered better to try a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist in question is Dr. Jack Mickler (Marlon Brando), who is nearing the end of his career. Dr. Mickler is successful, and de Marco is taken to the psych ward where they authorities are able to hold him involuntarily for up to 10 days for evaluation.

Dr. Mickler decides he's going to be the one to do the psychiatric evaluation, while his bosses just want to drug the poor patient into submission. So Mickler starts talking to de Marco, who claims he is in fact Don Juan, and starts telling all sorts of stories that seem like they should be too ridiculous for words, and have all sorts of inconsistencies. A century earlier, perhaps the stories might have been more realistic, but consdering de Marco would have been born in the early 1970s, there's no way any of the things he describes could have happened, which is kind of the point.

However, de Marco's presence at the pyschiatric hospital begins to have an effect. All of the nurses seem to be taken by him, and in Dr. Mickler's case, you wonder whether he's beginning to have difficulty distinguishing fact from fantasy. But de Marco is also helping out Mickler's personal life. At home, Micker is stuck in a rut with his wife Marilyn (Faye Dunaway). Talking to de Marco gives Mickler the gumption to try to put some spice back into his love life.

Still, there's the looming deadline of the 10 days' detention, and the finding of de Marco's grandmother. Grandma informs Dr. Mickler that not only is de Marco's story not true, the real story is somewhat more disturbing. He fell for a magazine centerfold and basically tried to stalk the poor woman until he was told in no uncertain terms to knock it off. At least he only tried to kill himself, not the woman. What will happen when de Marco has his meeting with the staff and a judge at the end of the ten days?

Don Juan de Marco is a movie that has an interesting premise, if one that's fairly unrealistic. It's also well photographed, and has a pretty good performance from Johnny Depp who certainly knows crazy after having been a disastrous relationshp with Amber Heard. Marlon Brando, on the other hand, make you feel like he's sleepwalking through the movie. Then again, I'm not as big a fan of Brando as some people are, so it may be in part my own prejudices. It's also a movie that TCM could show in 31 Days of Oscar since Bryan Adams' song "Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman" was nominated in the Original Song category.

If you want an interesting romantic fantasy, and something with more modern sensibilities than the classic movies I usually discuss, you could do a lot worse than Don Juan de Marco. But it could have been a better movie.