09.18.06
Los Angeles City Beat Review of ‘The Black Dahlia’
Nearly 60 years old now, the Black Dahlia case continues to cast its pulpy mythic spell over Los Angeles culture. It represents a time and a place that only a few of the living can remember for real; for the rest of us, postwar L.A. is a world of black and white, of nocturnal jazz, of tough guys in fedoras and sultry dolls in heels. In short, it’s the world of classic film noir, made at the time, about the time.
Of course, everyone knows that those films rarely had pretensions to realism, let alone documentary truth. But with the passage of time they are the images that endure and shape our collective memories in a way that may never again be possible. A world of camcorders and 24-hour news provides detail that is harsh and overexposed, if no closer to the truth. Despite its notoriety, the O.J. Simpson case – with everything but the initial violent act transmitted in real time as it occurred – can never achieve the sort of mythic status that has grown up around the sad life and gruesome death of Elizabeth Short.
Novelist James Ellroy reframed our view of the period in his L.A. Quartet, the first of which – 1987’s The Black Dahlia – has now been filmed by Brian De Palma. Ellroy’s prose can be overheated, but it’s also gripping, which is more than can be said for De Palma’s film, which sits on the screen, mysteriously inert and uninvolving, no matter the amount of sound and fury. The case has been covered in a number of other film and TV projects, the best being the thinly veiled version at the heart of Ulu Grosbard’s 1981 adaptation of John Gregory Dunne’s novel True Confessions. Sadly, it remains the one to beat.
Josh Hartnett stars as Dwight Bleichert – a.k.a. Bucky, a.k.a. Mr. Ice – one of a pair of boxers-turned-LAPD-partners. The other half of the team is Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart), ambitious, politically savvy, and ethically unsteady. In violation of department rules, Lee lives out of wedlock with Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson), the former moll of someone he sent up the river. Kay is educated, strong-willed, and sexually dissatisfied.
The three form a sort of unofficial family or, perhaps more accurately, triangle – Noël Coward’s Design for Living in shades of noir. Lee is not totally unaware that there is romantic tension between his best friend and his girl. The film drops a quick reference to the fact that she and Lee don’t sleep together, despite Kay’s apparent willingness. This bizarre celibacy is never explained further, leaving you to wonder just which of his partners Lee is more in love with.
When Short, soon to be dubbed “The Black Dahlia” by the press, is found murdered, grotesquely mutilated, and dumped in a vacant lot, Dwight and Lee are pulled off their current case and assigned to the Dahlia task force. Dwight resents the assignment, but Lee becomes obsessed, popping bennies to work around the clock. While chasing down Short’s associates, Dwight meets Madeleine Linscott (Hilary Swank), a hard-edged sexual adventuress whose father is a construction magnate. An affair ensues.
It is hard not to compare the film to Curtis Hanson’s 1997 L.A. Confidential, which remains the best Ellroy adaptation by a substantial margin. De Palma goes for a more artificial style, at times verging toward the unreality of Dick Richards’s 1975 Farewell My Lovely, which itself points toward Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City. (Maybe this has something to do with The Black Dahlia being shot primarily in Bulgaria.)
If the style doesn’t necessarily hurt the film, the casting sometimes does. Eckhart and Johansson are exactly right; at times, De Palma seems to direct them to overplay it, as though their characters are consciously drawing their manner from Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake movies. Hartnett, if less spot-on, is still believable in a more naturalistic performance, despite moments of distracting melodramatic excess: His voiceover includes clunkers like “Who are these men who feed on others?” And it’s hard not to giggle when passion drives him to messily yank away a tablecloth like a bad magician in order to make love on the tabletop. This bit invokes similar overwrought moments in Body Heat and The Postman Always Rings Twice (both 1981) that were, at best, only marginally more convincing.
But Swank is horribly miscast as the femme fatale. There’s a reason her two most successful performances were in Boys Don’t Cry and Million Dollar Baby: With her lean frame and square jaw, she is most at home in butch roles. She looks great in blue jeans, short hair, and no makeup – the very opposite of Madeleine Linscott.
Worse yet is John Kavanagh as Papa Linscott. His Scottish brogue may be genuine, but it sounds fake; his facial hair may be real, but it looks pasted on. Fiona Shaw is far more believable as Mama Linscott, even though the character is by design the most outrageous.
Numerous fine character actors fill the smaller parts: If you blink twice, you might miss Pepe Serna and Gregg Henry – victims of 11th-hour cutting, perhaps. The appearances of Rose McGowan, William Finley, and Ian McNeice are more satisfying and seem to be brief by design.
But the actor who holds the screen more powerfully than any other is Mia Kirshner as Elizabeth Short. The character doesn’t fit within the story’s chronological frame, but – since Short was known to have auditioned for Hollywood roles – De Palma shows us the cops viewing her screen tests. (In one, he also provides the offscreen voice of the audition’s director.) Short comes across as not very bright: She can’t remember lines, and her pride in her range of accents is misplaced. But, in the person of Kirshner, she projects what used to be called “It” – an attractiveness that far transcends a pretty face.
The real question is why – despite De Palma’s always-reliable technical skills – the movie never comes alive. It may well be his worst film since the execrable Wise Guys (1986).
The plot is a big contributor. Ellroy’s books are filled with more twists and revelations than can be reasonably transferred into a single feature. L.A. Confidential did a brilliant job of compressing, simplifying, and sometimes replacing Ellroy’s narrative complexities. The Black Dahlia may be too faithful to the letter of the book, if not the spirit.
This is not the first film to string out too many epiphanies. After the first few “Aha!” moments, we simply begin not to care. We may be stunned to learn that Professor Plum did it, not Mrs. White. We may then be admirably surprised when it turns out that Plum, for reasons in their distant past, was merely taking the fall for Mrs. Peacock. But by the time it’s revealed that Mrs. Peacock, for even more newly learned reasons, was acting on behalf of Colonel Mustard, the whole mess grows wearisome. The contrivances not only cancel each other out; they each tell us new ways that we’ve misread the characters, who grow steadily less familiar. By the end, we feel not so much impressed as manipulated.
Source: lacitybeat.com