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| | slant // magazine.com: Film Review - The Libertine |
 | | But The Libertine is a playground for this actor to flounce around in; he opens the film with a dark and brooding variation on Heathcliffe and closes it with rotting teeth, decaying flesh, soiled trousers, and whimpering pleas for forgiveness for having lived his life as a cad. |
 | | he role Johnny Depp essays in The Libertine is a maverick poet of the Restoration era who's drunk, free-spirited, brilliant, a skirt chaser, a dazzling wit, a patron of the arts, and suffers a protracted death from syphilis at the age of 33. |
 | | John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester, is a tragic artist figure in the Jim Morrison vein, heading down a hedonistic path to self-destruction, and what a way to go. |
| www.slantmagazine.com /film/film_review.asp?ID=1922 (435 words) |
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