Casanova: Movie & DVD Review (2006)

(Originally published 2006)

In Lasse Hallstrom's "Casanova," Heath Ledger comes off the success of "Brokeback Mountain" with a performance that ironically is too flaccid to get the job done.

Here, as the great 18th-century lover, Giovanni Giacomo Casanova, Ledger initially is all pony behind the ponytail, trotting through his alleged 10,000 sexual conquests--from the corseted ladies of high society to the looser trade found on the streets to a few scandalously, heretically passionate nuns--as if he were perfectly game for the sport, which by all appearances he is.

Watching him bed hop with so many women is enough to make you want to send Jake Gyllenhaal a note of condolence, urging him to remember the good times at Brokeback--the fireside canoodling--and that we're just as surprised as he is by Ledger's somewhat telling and immediate follow-up to "Brokeback."

But then you finish "Casanova" and you realize that Ledger should be the one receiving the condolences. When you're being seriously considered for an Academy Award, as Ledger is for "Brokeback," this is not the sort of movie you want lingering in voters' minds, particularly since it has tanked at the box office, which is a far greater sin in Hollywood than anything those aforementioned nuns have done.

About the nuns. The Catholic Church wants Casanova hanged for seducing them, but the Doge (Tim McInnerny) intervenes, proclaiming that if Casanova marries the presumably "pure" Victoria (Natalie Cormer) and puts a stop to his philandering ways, he might be spared from being, well, hung.

All of that sounds well and good, but catching Casanova's eye is Francesca, a tense piece of work with a secret life who is played by Sienna Miller with so much hard-mettled moxie, it's tough to like her. Worse for Miller, who perhaps came to the part overly prepared given her own real-life woes with the philandering Jude Law, she has almost no presence here. Just when she should command the screen most, she tends to disappear, which begs the question what it is that Casanova sees in her. A cross-dresser? Perhaps, since she is one.

Helping the proceedings somewhat is Oliver Platt as the overstuffed, overfed creature, Papprizzio, who has made a fortune shucking lard; Hallstrom's own wife, Lena Olin, as Francesca's fantastically bewigged mother; and Jeremy Irons as the inquisitor Bishop Pucci, who gives a performance that makes everyone in "The Producers" seem tame by comparison.

In the end, what sinks "Casanova" is that history knows he was a far more interesting man than the horny dullard presented here. From Jeffrey Hatcher and Kimberly Simi's script, this slight, silly costume comedy gives the illusion of frivolity and movement, but in spite of its teaming onslaught of subplots, it's oddly static and uninvolving. The film is played as farce, which robs it of the serious emotion it ultimately courts. It's a film in which the sight of a lovely hot-air balloon floating high above Venice amid a sea of exploding fireworks is as dangerous as the story gets.

Grade: C-