At what was once the Bucket of Blood pub on tiny Rose Street near Covent Garden (now the Lamb and Flag), Poet Laureate John Dryden was fittingly beaten to a bloody pulp by henchman of the Earl of Rochester, John Wilmot, for some satirical verses that Wilmot took exception to. Fortunately, this wasn't Wilmot's only foray into literature.

The Earl of Rochester was a writer to reckon with during the reign of Charles II. A poet and playwright, Wilmot could probably best be described as pre-Sadean, as much of his writing would not look out of place in the famed Marquis' collected work. Those twin demons of sex and power formed the mainspring of his thought, as they did for de Sade. Indeed, if his famous stage directions from his play Sodom (where the "kissing and dandling" of men's "codds" are requested before the entire troupe "falls to fucking") are not as well-known as the Bard's "Exit, chased by a bear," one must still marvel at the fact that it was written in 1680 for the London stage. As Lady Caroline Lamb said of Lord Byron a century and some later, John Wilmot was "mad, bad and dangerous to know."

Based on Stephen Jeffreys' play, Libertine attempts to bring the earl's life to the screen in all of its tarnished splendor. With Johnny Depp bewigged as Wilmot and John Malkovich tarted-up as Good Time Charlie himself, the proposed audacity of the enterprise seemed promising. However, a play by the black-and-blue Dryden would have been far more exciting.

First, director Laurence Dunmore could have done more with a wider palette for the film's colors, as Libertine appears to be submerged in a mire. Considering Wilmot's life, this might have been Dunmore's intention. However, it makes for a dreary two hours. Mud-brown accents storm gray, while everyone looks as chalk-blanched as a syphilitic strumpet or fop, whether sporting sores or not (Stanley Kubrick achieved more by candlelight in Barry Lyndon).

This monochromatic shading aside, Jeffreys' play has not successfully left the boards for celluloid. It is, in fact, stagey (always a problem when you make the playwright the screenwriter). The dialogue sounds as if it has slipped from a lectern, but Dunmore doesn't help matters by producing static scenes. The actors all seem to be striking poses, while ever so poised and peruked. Also, Dunmore stages some of the most staid perversions in memory. One orgy in St. James' Park is practically chaste, as it's conducted in a pea-soup fog bank where it's difficult to discern who is doing what.

For the most part, the performances wouldn't necessarily embarrass a BBC costume drama, though Depp does give one of his worst in some time. His delivery is as colorless as Dunmore's scenic design, with a voice reduced to a husky boudoir growl that hopes to approximate wantonness.

Libertine bears more than a passing resemblance to Richard Eyre's problematic yet more interesting film, Stage Beauty (2004). The period is roughly the same — the early years of Charles II's Restoration, when the king (having been corrupted by French ways during his exile) boldly insisted on women playing the roles of women on stage. No longer were women characters left to the band of trained boys (those "squeaking Cleopatras") who originated the parts of Juliet, Desdemona and Ophelia in the Bard's day (territory covered, of course, in Shakespeare in Love).

One of the more ludicrous elements of Stage Beauty is also resurrected here in Libertine, where Wilmot, like the actor Ned Kynaston in Stage Beauty (excellently played by Billy Crudup), takes an actress under his wing to train her in "reality." Wilmot's presaging de Sade is one thing, but becoming a pre-Stanislavskian theoretician is quite another. It's a bizarre twisting of historical acting techniques that seems based on a modern prejudice that assumes Realism is the greatest achievement, if not the acme, of theatrical evolution.