Well, I guess the title says it all. Sometimes, the *dullness *of a character is a keypoint, something which is easily visually enhanced by having the character dress only in murky, un-happy colors like beige or grey.
Off the top off my head, I can think of three instances of this. One is in the movie “the Mask”, where Jim Carrey’s character is more or less always dressed in a beige palette as long as he doesn’t wear the mask, when he becomes bright green and yellow. The other example is from “Burn after reading”, where Frances McDormand’s date is dressed in a very blaha-ish palette. The third is in the movie “the Cooler”, where, if I recall correctly, William H. Macy wears light colored clothes if he’s in a good mood and more greyish, low-key clothes when he’s down.
Well, he certainly wasn’t a dull character, but Tony Soprano wears a lot of beige and dully colored clothing, probably to drive home the contrast between his dual life as a mafioso and a family man.
My dad thinks Tony’s wardrobe is great and has joked about dressing like him when he wears earth tones and such.
Characters? Hell, it’s been done to entire eras, notably the 1930s. Actual artifacts from those years are frequently colorful, but art directors don’t feel that conveys Depression very well.
This is a feature of the animated films The Little Mermaid and The Corpse Bride. The initial palettes used in the opening scenes (both set in our “Real” World) are muted and dull, with beige/grey/brown predominating, but with even the “brighter” colors like blue and red severely muted.
But, in The Little Mermaid, the moment the fish drops overboard we are in a startling bright, colorful world, making the distinction immediately (if, to most people “subliminally”)obvious – “Under the Sea” is a fun place, and much more interesting than our dull world. In later scenes of the Upper World, though, the colors aren’t muted any more – we want to experience Ariel’s excitement at seeing this new World.
In The Corpse Bridge, though, the Real World is pretty dully colored throughout, while the Underworld is brightly lit and colored – garish, even. The point is to make the World of the Dead interesting an attractive – even though its denizens are pretty skeletal, and often infested with maggots and the like (although they’re witty maggots).
Adrian Monk always wears the same dull clothes that emphasize how stodgy and stiff he is. (Of course, his extreme case of OCD would make him want to wear the same clothes, too.)
