Saturday, September 16, 2006
Review: The Black Dahlia
One of the challenges in reviewing a film is separating what you loved on screen from an objective assessment of whether the film works. As a pure fetish film, The Black Dahlia offers everything I came into it hoping for: sexy femmes fatale, dirty cops, black sedans, violent murders, and dizzying camera work. It's a hopped-up version of film noir that takes place in a hyperreality somewhere between author James Ellroy and director Brian DePalma's respectively dark worlds. Unfortunately, the story gets lost somewhere in the darkness.
The Black Dahlia is the nickname given by the press to Elizabeth Short (played by Mia Kirshner in flashbacks and photographic evidence), an aspiring starlet who was murdered in 1947, her body mutilated and bisected, her cheek cut from ear to ear, and abandoned in a field in Los Angeles. James Ellroy's novel, however, does not exactly center on the murder. It follows two cops, Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart), assigned to the case. As they obsess over the murder, Bleichert falls for Blanchard's girlfriend Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansen) while also becoming obsessed with Madeleine Winscott (Hillary Swank), a society dame who bares a resemblance to the murdered Betty Short.
The Black Dahlia seems such a perfect match for DePalma. It takes place in the Los Angeles of 1947, a mythical fairyland for film lovers, and it deals with the themes of obsession that have fueled so much of his career. Most of all, the novel hints at a wonderful visual motif: the macabre grin carved into the cheeks of the famous murder victim, reflected in a painting depicting a similarly mutilated character from Victor Hugo's novel The Man Who Laughs (further reflected in DePalma's movie by the 1928 silent film starring Conrad Veidt, which Blanchard, Bleichert and Lake are seen watching together in a theater), a grotesque motif that you would expect to recur throughout the film like the spiral designs in Vertigo, to convey the detectives' obsession with the murder.
In fairness to DePalma, many of the problems with the film originate in Ellroy's novel, which solves the murder mystery in a convoluted series of absurd twists and revelations about characters the reader has little interest in. These problems are further exacerbated by the reduction of the dense novel into a screenplay. There are plot points that are never quite explained, and the script seems to take it for granted that the audience has a familiarity with the lesser works of Victor Hugo.
These are problems we can deal with--the oblique narratives in The Big Sleep and Lady From Shanghai have done little to hurt their reputation over the years. Where I think the film drops the ball is in conveying the sense of obsession that is central to the novel, and how obsession with the dead Betty Short infects both Blanchard and Bleichert. The Dahlia case never seems all that important to Bleichert in the film. He's just going through the motions of detective work (and although I leave this movie convinced that Hartnett is a lightweight, I don't place the blame for this on his shoulders). Eckhart does a better job with what little he's given, but his character ends up receding so far into the background that he becomes more of a plot point than a character. This is more than a little surprising considering how central the idea of unhealthy obsession is to DePalma's work.
But the biggest problem, the Achilles' heel of the whole structure of the movie, lies with the casting of Hillary Swank and Mia Kirshner. Swank's character is supposed to bear a striking resemblance to Betty Short. This is referenced repeatedly, and is treated as an important plot point. Yet there is no resemblance. I understand that the casting of a name actor like Swank goes a long way toward getting a movie made in Hollywood, while Kirshner was cast because of some resemblance to the real life Betty Short, but this is a serious problem, especially for a story that hinges on visual connections.
Despite this long list of reasons why I think the film doesn't work, I don't want to discourage anyone from seeing it. The Black Dahlia is a full-on dose of gonzo filmmaking, with at least four great setpieces (including a bloody gunfight on a stairwell and an erotic musical number in a lesbian bar) and dozens of deliciously noir shots. Hillary Swank is as great as she's ever been, Scarlett Johansen is classically glamorous and does the best she can with what little she's given, and Fiona Shaw, best known as Harry Potter's bitchy Aunt Petunia, gives an absolutely insane, over-the-top performance that seems like it belongs in another movie entirely. As many complaints as I have about the film, the one thing I can not say against it is that I was bored.
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