Our Dark Places
De Palma makes a killing of a comeback with "The Black Dahlia." (Film Review)
by Michael Sean McGowan
The Upside: De Palma back to delivering the voyeur goods.
The Downside: It isn't as freaky of a ride as it could have been.
James Ellroy's novels exist in a space outside of what we tend to picture when we think "noir," particularly the 40s and 50s shades of it. Nowhere in his stories are the clean-cut, Robin Hood-style cops of Dragnet, out to just do a day's work and bring the bad guy in for justice. Nowhere is the rough but still white-hat charm of Chandler's Philip Marlowe, who may have had the walk and talk of a street scrapper but never fell on the wrong side of the divide in the City of Angels. Like a man addicted to his life in a mental institution, Ellroy has always been comfortable in a kaleidoscopic world of pimps, murderers, stag films, and corrupt cops whose varying degrees of being "dirty" is the only windswept line between the hero cops and the villains. There is no moral equivalency in an Ellroy story- there are no morals, period. There is the crime, the violence, the degradation, and then there are simply different levels of the fallen.
The Black Dahlia, one of Ellroy's first "L.A. noir" novels that takes a howling joy ride with the real case of Elizabeth Short, the wanna-be actress whose butchered body was discovered in an L.A. vacant lot on a January morning in 1947, couldn't have put the author in a better place, or with a better set of real-life circumstances to time his dance to. With its just-emerging factors of extreme gore (the body was cut in half and disemboweled) and smell of sexual deviance (rumors abounded about Short's proclivities), the story would become one of Hollywood's first blood-soaked media legends a decade before George Reeves and almost fifty years before O.J. Simpson and a white Bronco. The novel put on a true crime face, but underneath the most basic fact checking The Black Dahlia was purely an Ellroy baby, an odd parable about cops as brothers in both vice and madness, and the plague rot eating away everything behind Movie City glamour.
After Curtis Hanson's adaptation of L.A. Confidential got tagged as a next-gen Chinatown (despite less than stellar box office business), a working of Dahlia has been in off-and-on-again limbo for a few years until it finally got picked up by Brian De Palma, the man who graced us with that other noir-ish masterpiece, The Untouchables. The result is fairly pleasing, if mostly because De Palma, who hasn't made a movie in four years and hasn't made a good movie in over ten (jury's still out on Mission: Impossible), sidesteps away from the showboating that turned Snake Eyes and Mission to Mars into such blithering embarrassments. Not that it doesn't look good; Dante Ferretti's production of post-war L.A. is thickly varnished (even if the streets do seem oddly underpopulated) and De Palma still knows how to work a few tricks with a camera- a tracking crane shot of the Dahlia discovery is a small masterpiece purely in the mode of Hitchcock.
If L.A. Confidential was, by far, the better movie, then The Black Dahlia is the more faithful adaptation, with De Palma taking the fearless plunge into Ellroy's headspace and coming out with a thicket of plots you'd normally have to cut through with a machete. Critics have complained that Dahlia's plot is over-complicated- probably since it doesn't drop us into the gore pool right off the bat, introducing us to two LAPD "supercops," Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and Leland "Lee" Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) and tangling us up in their own private universes. Around the station house they're known simply as "Mr. Fire" and "Mr. Ice," pseudonyms bestowed upon them when they go head-to-head in an exhibition boxing match to raise public awareness for an LAPD bond initiative. Neither cop is a picture of pristine grace: Bleichert takes a dive in a fight to score some money to put his ailing dad into an assisted living home while the more austere Blanchard does a criminal robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul act, cozying up to one mobster to score inside info on another. Between the two men comes Blanchard's girl, Kay Lake (an everywhere Scarlett Johansson), a former hooker and possible target of a low-means dope dealer about to be sprung from the can.
Yes, Dahlia is incredibly busy, packing in enough plot for two movies before the dead ingénue is even found, but that's the way of an Ellroy three-ring circus and I've got to admire De Palma for taking the saturation approach. It might not make it incredibly accessible, it's a few small steps short of requiring the book to be read in advance as a primer, but unlike last week's pallid Hollywoodland, Dahlia actually earns its noir stripes and its schizophrenic plotting comes more from trying to shove too much in than adding inconsequentional nonsense as filler for a fattening, nutrition-low Twinkie. Basically, I'd rather see a movie that has too much to do rather than one that has nothing, and the additional layers of deceit, graft and corruption on top of the Main Event add a flavor as scrumptious as Mark Isham's cool jazz score. It isn't a sure bet- if you can dig Ellroy's over-the-top novelty, you can dig the plate-spinning lunacy of the whole thing. As public hysteria and hype over the killing reach a shrill pitch, Blanchard becomes more and more obsessed with the case, while Bleichert's investigation leads him to the curves of the daughter of a shady LA real estate tycoon (Hillary Swank) whose Mad Hatter family could pass as the road cast for A Rose for Emily.
To De Palma's credit, if he gets Ellroy so right in many of the smaller details, including his propensity for quirky, gat-sharp, beatnik dialogue, lost-soul heroes, and rivers of sludge and sleaze running through the LA streets, then The Black Dahlia's biggest weakness is that it misses the One Big Thing. In Ellroy's world, criminals aren't just criminals, they're borderline demonic psychopaths who live out their lives in their own private circle of Hell. The cruel, Dante twist is that the cops are there with them, voluntary prisoners having bared witness to the worst that humanity can inflict on itself. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't recall a single Ellroy cop novel that didn't feature some subplot about a crazed serial killer as well as a mirrored cop driven past the line of sanity while trying to pick up the pieces. This was Ellroy's big theme in The Black Dahlia- both cops learning so much about Short they come to love her, and see avenging her as a way of protecting her after the fact, to the point that Bleichert begins seeing his Daddy's Girl Squeeze as a post-mortem substitute. The obsession angle is kind of there in the film, it gives Eckhart a few moments to throw a temper tantrum, but De Palma strangely keeps it locked behind a brick wall. The cops' fixation ought to become ours, but it never does. But as preposterous as much of Dahlia's answers are, they are at least absurd in that baroque, horror show way and De Palma dresses up the dénouement in a carny funhouse lunacy that's a perfect compliment to the Ellroy thesis of crime and dementia as two ends of the same boat.
And at least there's a story here, whether you indulge it for a second is your decision. De Palma has spent so long hanging curtains in stories that were not worth a damn, it's nice to see him back tricking something out with a bit originality and sanitarium fun. The performances are workable- Hartnett worked up better noir as a scene-stealing assassin in Sin City, but Johannson at least gets to do a femme fatale emulation, scraping out every word of cigarette-wielding dialogue like she's going to work with an ice pick. As noir, as a mystery, Dahlia never completely plays fair, but then again neither has Ellroy. The man of The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential sees things as too wild and unwieldy to be so neat, and in some ways it is a beautiful, gilded mess that De Palma does us the favor of never cleaning up. B
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