2) Edward in Edward Scissorhands
It’s funny how you can go back and watch an actor’s old work and be like oh yeah, that’s what made them such a big deal. The Johnny Depp of today still manages to produce some decent work, but I’m sure a lot of people are wishing he would find a way to recapture the magic he made back in 1990 with Edward Scissorhands. Maybe he’s just too cool to play an innocent creature like Edward these days.
Without getting into too much boring history, Edward is a throwback to German movies of the 1920s, the stuff you watch in university film classes in black and white with the high contrast lighting and heavy makeup and exaggerated acting. Tim Burton is in love with that stuff. He draws from it in Edward Scissorhands but instead of melodramatic acting he uses the strange looking makeup and lack of speech to create a weird but beautiful character, an unfinished creation trying to understand the world by observing and learning as much as he can.
The key to all this is Depp’s eyes; they’re every bit as expressive as an old silent film actor’s but with the subtle appropriate to modern cinema. They bring the fairytale aspects together with the absurd surrealism of the suburban setting, and express as much meaning and emotion as thousands of words would have been able to do.
