FROM HELL (2001) **1/2 Sex, drugs and violence on London's poorest backstreets, in the shadow of British freemasonry's holiest square, casting a pall of implications against the very crown itself. It's the sort of film that Johnny Depp couldn't stay out of, obviously, and he appears to have a very good idea of what someone mixing Laudanum and absinthe should look like. The grotesquely pompous nature of the aristocracy of the day is captured nicely, and the associations between Depp's drug-induced trances, Jack the Ripper's extracurricular activities, and the metaphysics of the masons remains appropriately murky. Of course some will say that a mystery should remain a mystery, but Depp and the Hughes brothers (Albert and Allen, who play the right devices to accentuate that absinthe thang) look like they have enough evidence to go to trial. The Ripper's conclusions regarding the credibility of his masonic peers in judging him are telling, as is his own fate. If there's always another secret circle of initiates, why shouldn't one man stand in it alone; and so if the authority of the individual is tantamount, what's the point of secret societies, anyway? If it's to keep their loonier members on a short leash it doesn't work here, though no less than the queen herself is observed expressing gratitude for...if not Jack's handiwork, at least for the removal of some troubling aspect of the realm. Depp plays his character at an uncharacteristic distance from romantic sensibilities, which distracts from the passion of the denouement (Heather Graham, struggling with a terrible English accent that's even further from the Irish one that it's supposed to be) while enabling the previous scenes to pass unmolested. Even artists, it seems, do unchangeable things, perversely exclusive and limitative things, final things, sacrificial things.
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