Johnny Depp is in the middle of an image crisis. His career has been upended by accusations of domestic abuse, he’s been sacked from his most lucrative gig, and he has an unsettling tendency to come off like Colonel Kurtz in magazine profiles. Honestly, it’s hard to see a way out for him.
But maybe a way out exists. Maybe it’s through the medium of low-budget character studies. This would certainly explain his latest film, The Professor, and its newly released, genuinely baffling trailer. Why is it baffling? Let’s run through it and take a look.
Ah, OK, that’s why it’s baffling. In The Professor, Johnny Depp plays a human being who looks like Johnny Depp. Not a wizard or a pirate or a mad hatter or a deranged chocolate magnate or a Native American or a vampire or a famous gangster or a man who looks like Johnny Depp but turns out to be a world-famous supercriminal or a man who looks like Johnny Depp but then becomes the literal human manifestation of the internet. He’s just Johnny Depp, A Man. This rarely happens.
Which brings us to the plot of The Professor. In The Professor, Depp plays a man who learns that he only has six months to live and subsequently disregards all of society’s stifling rules. So he still teaches, only now he does it outside while wearing a cool pair of sunglasses. GOODBYE RULES.
See? If this trailer had a bigger budget, it would almost certainly be soundtracked by Bad to the Bone by George Thorogood. Instead, it is a song that sounds like whatever copyright-free rip-off of Bad to the Bone the Food Network plays whenever Guy Fieri looks at an especially large hamburger. Anyway, I think the message here is GOODBYE RULES.
How else does Depp’s brazenly anti-authoritarian terminal diagnosis manifest itself? That’s right, vaguely irresponsible dog transportation. Yeah, like I said, GOODBYE RULES.
But don’t be fooled into thinking that The Professor is just an hour and a half of Depp wearing sunglasses and driving dogs around and saying goodbye to the general concept of rules. Because he also has marital problems. His wife is sleeping with his boss, something that causes him to glumly get dressed out of focus in the foreground. He’s not just crazy, you see; he’s also troubled. Remind you of anyone?
You’re probably thinking, “The Professor looks fun, but does the trailer contain a shot of him giving a sad-eyed toast?” The good news is, it does. The better news is that it’s accompanied by a snatch of conversation in which his wife says, “What happened to us?” and he replies, “What happened to us? Life”, which I’m sure you’ll agree is actually quite profound. But it’s OK, because then he drops the glass. On purpose. GOODBYE RULES.
Despite all this sadness, Depp’s character is also desirable enough to have sex with a waitress in her place of work immediately after meeting her. Look at him, all floppy-haired and dishevelled, just like he was back in the 90s before the very sight of him involuntarily conjured up upsetting mental images of spousal abuse. Happier times, eh?
Towards the end of the trailer, we see Depp driving towards an actual crossroad. Now you’re thinking, “Surely film-makers have long since agreed that visual metaphors this thuddingly heavy-handed have no place in modern cinema.” And you’d be right. But this is The Professor, and you know what that means. GOODBYE RULES.
