“Funnily enough, Casanova ended up being my prolonged audition piece for Doctor Who. I didn’t realize this at the time.” David Tennant, Masterpiece interview
David Tennant’s Casanova. The role that caught the attention of Russell T. Davies which eventually won him Doctor Who. It never quite came together for me. I do know why David, having done this part, was a shoe-in for the Doctor. He did his usual riveting job, and handled all the varied elements with poise and ease. He played both the raw sensuality of the famous lover and the toll it exacted in equal measure, as only he can. The scenes where Casanova and his one true love communicate via mime are true genius. BUT. The real problem I had with Casanova is that Peter O’Toole, who played old Casanova, famously has blue eyes. David’s are brown. So on every close-up they colored David’s eyes. I don’t think contacts were used, because in profile or far away shots his eyes are still brown. I would bet it was retouched in post production. (Edit: He, in fact, DID wear “blue colored contacts for four months” as relayed on the Jodie Whittaker episode of David Tennant Does a Podcast, 2019.) The result is bizarre and yanked me out of the story during every important scene. I’m sorry, David Tennant does not have blue eyes, and his performance is always about his eyes, about how he can make them flat or soft, or jet black or amber. And the emotion he brought to life was sapped because of the fake blue.
I wonder what they would have done, if Casanova had been produced now instead of then. Would they have messed with David’s eye color? In a way they had to, and I get it. But the result was a travesty.
Decoy Bride was “cute, innocuous fluff” to quote a pioneer rebel of cable blurbs that used to post personal movie reviews instead of the synopsis. (We used to spend whole afternoons on our TV scrolling through the all the different blurbs he had written. He had redone most of them before they started disappearing and reverted back to something less colorful. I always wished him well, hoping his genius and rebellious spirit would lead him to the kind of success he deserved.) It wasn’t bad, but it certainly wasn’t brilliant. It was fun. Reminiscent of Forgetting Sarah Marshall for me, but a kind of mirror image; the funny bits weren’t as funny but I liked the characters better here. I could see my mother-in-law really enjoying it. A huge problem for me was that the main characters had really good chemistry but the crowning kiss was DREADFUL. At first I assumed this is a “now I’m married thing” because David’s stage kisses in other shows he’s been in are perfectly satisfactory. (Blackpool was actually MORE than satisfactory, sigh.) There are a couple of problems with this theory. The first is that he wasn’t actually married when he did Decoy Bride. The second is that I have just had the epiphany that you can’t go out with David Tennant and have a jealous bone in your body. Well, I suppose you could go out with him, but not for very long. He’s like a walking woman magnet. If he buys a magazine from the corner store and says “hi” to the lady behind the counter, she melts. His straightforward exchange with the secretary in Takin’ Over the Asylum wrought a warm change in tone and an eyelid flutter from her. His home video of the read through of “Planet of the Dead” looked like the “Gaston” number from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast with gorgeous production assistants and interns lined up by the door to greet him while he entered, cooing over him. If you are married to David Tennant, you are rich in tolerance and possess a fine sense of self-worth. Because what is jealousy but an aggressive form of insecurity? Back to the kiss, there is sort of a cultural difference, because in America actors have to kiss a certain way in romantic scenes whether or not they’re paired off in real life; and it’s full out with tongue and long minutes of lip lock. That’s what the audiences expect here. Similar British scenes are more restrained and the actors and directors have choices about how to handle it. I have the American view that in that moment it shouldn’t matter anyway because it’s the characters kissing, not the actors (probably married porn stars use the same defense). Do Brits see it differently? And who did this odd hesitancy come from? After seeing Blackpool, I initially wondered if David flirts with infidelity, or has a particular history of doing so. (See “Acting Love” for more on this.) I know that a part after all, is a part; and just because you play a serial killer doesn’t mean you are one. It’s just that he does it so well. In Blackpool, he propositions a married woman with such aplomb and confidence, you can watch him twist her words and feelings until she has almost no choice but to move to him of her own accord. It was very Dangerous Liaisons, but I actually believed him more than John Malkovich’s performance in that movie, because he didn’t overdo it and the very nonchalance made the impact greater. There was no sense of playacting, or crowing his prowess to the world, just a man who knows with the confidence of experience that he could make any woman fall into his arms after a couple of carefully engineered meetings. And he’s doing it simply because he wants the woman. You can see the ruthlessness of Casanova in him then. I can’t think of any other actor who has captured it so precisely.
Blackpool was like small-time Sopranos with song and dance numbers. Like the mafia does Glee. It was ridiculously charming. I only saw one episode on YouTube but I would see more gladly.
Report from the End of the Universe 