The Black Dahlia
It has been over a decade since Brian De Palma's last good film. That fact keeps on coming back to the audience as they watch The Black Dahlia, his latest attempt at respectability following the straight-to-DVD Femme Fatale, the pompous, Tim-Robbins-wasting Mission to Mars, the flashy, empty Snake Eyes, and so on, and so on, ad infinitum... All the trademarks are here; hip-swinging evil women, suffocating stylistic mannerisms (not since Battlefield Earth has the 'wipe' been so overused), blatant Hitchcock rip-offs - the only new thing is that, unlike previous De Palma catastrophes like Body Double and the aforementioned Femme Fatale, The Black Dahlia is boring.
The film The Black Dahlia most reminds me of is Michael Cimino's Desperate Hours, a remake of the Humphrey Bogart thriller which Cimino saw as an opportunity to prove he could behave himself and turn in a simple thriller on time and under budget. Desperate Hours had a terrific performance from Mickey Rourke in the Bogart role and very little else; Cimino was so desperate to stay on track that he vetoed any creative decisions that might have livened the movie up.
I've never been sold by the idea that De Palma is a master stylist. His films generally have one or two dazzling flourishes like Carrie's split-screen or Bonfire of the Vanities's opening tracking shot before settling down into a very average TV movie groove. The Black Dahlia is no exception. The occasional crane shot or slo-mo sequence feels like a very dull man's idea of interesting film-making, and barring one dazzlingly over-stylized murder sequence the overall mood is hazy, flat, sluggish, sepia-toned, practically embalmed by its own period detail. It's hard to imagine any other movie about true crime, power, corruption, Hollywood and bisexuality being so bloody tedious. Even the much-vaunted sex and violence is tame, tame stuff.
James Ellroy is probably the greatest contemporary crime writer of our time, taking snatches of real-life LA and Washington scandals and reworking them into labyrinths of rumours, lies and paranoia. His books are very hard to make into movies, and it's telling that in the nine years since LA Confidential no Ellroy adaptation has been green-lit. (There have been attempts at White Jazz and My Dark Places, but they fell through)
Simply put, the problem is this: there's just too much in these books. Cut back Ellroy's famously gargantuan plots and you risk collapsing the whole movie, cut back on the characters and you essentially have two hours of exposition. De Palma and screenwriter Josh Friedman choose the latter option, creating a very dull slog of people you don't care about doing things you don't really understand because they haven't been explained with any sort of clarity or liveliness.
This is all dumped on Josh Hartnett's head. He's actually pretty good - a step closer to his superior early performances in movies like The Virgin Suicides and The Faculty - but he's far too green to cope with such a heavy role. His narration reminds me of Harrison Ford's voice-over for Blade Runner, except that was famously meant to sound boring and this wasn't. Elsewhere, Aaron Eckhart and Scarlett Johanssen play caricatures. They can and have done better before, particularly Eckhart, but they don't get the chance here. Mia Kirshner is OK as Elizabeth Short, though her true-life story is interesting enough to drain all remaining interest away from the fictional material. Rose Macgowan pops up for a grating cameo.
There are precisely two interesting performances in the middle of all this smothering tedium. They're interesting for pretty diametrically opposed reasons. Hilary Swank steals the movie as a shamefully under-used Beth Short lookalike who confesses to having had an affair with the tragic actress (in real life, Short was exclusively heterosexual and genetically incapable of making love, a fact that shows you how painstaking Ellroy's research into his subject was). She's cast wildly against type and rewards the casting director's faith with interest; snobby, sexy and thoroughly nasty, she gives the movie CPR every time she appears. (De Palma's take on lesbianism, by the way, is that it is very, very shocking and its mere existence will be enough to blow most viewers' minds. Apparently he has never ventured outside his home in the last twenty years)
The other interesting performance is Fiona Shaw as Swank's neurotic mother. De Palma primed us for this with a ridiculous scene featuring Hartnett's unbelievably elderly, pigeon-killing Teutonic daddy earlier on, but even that can't prepare the innocent viewer for the horrors that lurk chez Swank. Every time Shaw was on screen, my mouth was literally hanging open in shock; what does she think she's doing? Why did no-one tell her what she looked like? What on earth is going on? Shaw shrieks, grimaces, cackles insanely and contorts her body into shapes resembling a living Al Hirschfield cartoon. The Black Dahlia is not worth paying any money to see, but you may wish to download it for Shaw's scenes, if only to see the sort of bad performance that only a truly gifted actress can put in. When she's on screen, The Black Dahlia becomes the funny-bad movie De Palma is capable of, and should have delivered. I've lost faith in him producing anything good any more.
The film The Black Dahlia most reminds me of is Michael Cimino's Desperate Hours, a remake of the Humphrey Bogart thriller which Cimino saw as an opportunity to prove he could behave himself and turn in a simple thriller on time and under budget. Desperate Hours had a terrific performance from Mickey Rourke in the Bogart role and very little else; Cimino was so desperate to stay on track that he vetoed any creative decisions that might have livened the movie up.
I've never been sold by the idea that De Palma is a master stylist. His films generally have one or two dazzling flourishes like Carrie's split-screen or Bonfire of the Vanities's opening tracking shot before settling down into a very average TV movie groove. The Black Dahlia is no exception. The occasional crane shot or slo-mo sequence feels like a very dull man's idea of interesting film-making, and barring one dazzlingly over-stylized murder sequence the overall mood is hazy, flat, sluggish, sepia-toned, practically embalmed by its own period detail. It's hard to imagine any other movie about true crime, power, corruption, Hollywood and bisexuality being so bloody tedious. Even the much-vaunted sex and violence is tame, tame stuff.
James Ellroy is probably the greatest contemporary crime writer of our time, taking snatches of real-life LA and Washington scandals and reworking them into labyrinths of rumours, lies and paranoia. His books are very hard to make into movies, and it's telling that in the nine years since LA Confidential no Ellroy adaptation has been green-lit. (There have been attempts at White Jazz and My Dark Places, but they fell through)
Simply put, the problem is this: there's just too much in these books. Cut back Ellroy's famously gargantuan plots and you risk collapsing the whole movie, cut back on the characters and you essentially have two hours of exposition. De Palma and screenwriter Josh Friedman choose the latter option, creating a very dull slog of people you don't care about doing things you don't really understand because they haven't been explained with any sort of clarity or liveliness.
This is all dumped on Josh Hartnett's head. He's actually pretty good - a step closer to his superior early performances in movies like The Virgin Suicides and The Faculty - but he's far too green to cope with such a heavy role. His narration reminds me of Harrison Ford's voice-over for Blade Runner, except that was famously meant to sound boring and this wasn't. Elsewhere, Aaron Eckhart and Scarlett Johanssen play caricatures. They can and have done better before, particularly Eckhart, but they don't get the chance here. Mia Kirshner is OK as Elizabeth Short, though her true-life story is interesting enough to drain all remaining interest away from the fictional material. Rose Macgowan pops up for a grating cameo.
There are precisely two interesting performances in the middle of all this smothering tedium. They're interesting for pretty diametrically opposed reasons. Hilary Swank steals the movie as a shamefully under-used Beth Short lookalike who confesses to having had an affair with the tragic actress (in real life, Short was exclusively heterosexual and genetically incapable of making love, a fact that shows you how painstaking Ellroy's research into his subject was). She's cast wildly against type and rewards the casting director's faith with interest; snobby, sexy and thoroughly nasty, she gives the movie CPR every time she appears. (De Palma's take on lesbianism, by the way, is that it is very, very shocking and its mere existence will be enough to blow most viewers' minds. Apparently he has never ventured outside his home in the last twenty years)
The other interesting performance is Fiona Shaw as Swank's neurotic mother. De Palma primed us for this with a ridiculous scene featuring Hartnett's unbelievably elderly, pigeon-killing Teutonic daddy earlier on, but even that can't prepare the innocent viewer for the horrors that lurk chez Swank. Every time Shaw was on screen, my mouth was literally hanging open in shock; what does she think she's doing? Why did no-one tell her what she looked like? What on earth is going on? Shaw shrieks, grimaces, cackles insanely and contorts her body into shapes resembling a living Al Hirschfield cartoon. The Black Dahlia is not worth paying any money to see, but you may wish to download it for Shaw's scenes, if only to see the sort of bad performance that only a truly gifted actress can put in. When she's on screen, The Black Dahlia becomes the funny-bad movie De Palma is capable of, and should have delivered. I've lost faith in him producing anything good any more.