World to Josh Hartnett: You are No Humphrey Bogart. And as for that Johansson...
Written: May 15 '07 (Updated May 15 '07)
Product Rating:
Pros: De Palma's visuals.
Cons: Idiotic plot and hopelessly incompetent leads.
The Bottom Line: A passable snack for noir nuts and a risible trawl for everyone else, I would advise avoiding the Black Dahlia with the same tenacity as its plot does sense.
Let’s get one thing straight; Hollywood noir was never about the plots. The Big Sleep? Inscrutable. Maltese Falcon? Twaddle. Sensuous and dangerous, audiences were nonetheless left spellbound by the swarthy charisma of jolie-laide Bogart and the cheap, deep thrill of sinister beauties and smoking guns.
Brian De Palma’s Black Dahlia, based on James Ellroy’s novelisation of an infamous L.A. murder, clearly wants to capture the same sort of dark magnetism. Indeed, so accurate is the aping of the greats that even the same sprawling, nonsensical storyline structure is appropriated. It goes without saying that this is a fatal error in judgment that misses the appeal of Bogart noir completely. No one cared that The Big Sleep made no damn sense, because Bogie and Bacall circling each other, lips like knives, tongues like bullets, was all anyone paid for anyway.
Suffice to say, charm quarry Josh Hartnett is no Humphrey Bogart. Here channelling police officer Dwight ‘Bucky’ Bleichert through an enviable inventory of eyebrow manoeuvres, his ‘smell the fart’ technique leaves much to be desired. Even more useless is a mouthbreathing Scarlett Johansson as Bleichert's sweetheart Kay Lake. Lumpen and dead eyed, she only ever seems at ease when playing at Bette Davis cool with one of those groovy cigarette holders poking from her puffy mouth. Lauren Bacall could pick her toenails with more eroticism than this broad could suck off a lollipop.
Better is Hilary Swank. A sturdy, athletic screen presence -she doesn't so much act as flex- she is horribly miscast as femme fatale Madeleine Linscott but has fun regardless. Her gauche abandon is clearly a relief from having to prod her audience into emission in those onanastic Oscarbait circle jerks. The problem is her character. An ugly, modern thing, this boorishly titilating construct of lesbianism as phallocratic circus is evidence that the Hays code, if nothing else, enforced discretion on filmmakers when concocting their gaudiest fantasies.
One of the many frustrating things about this film is that the one competently cast actress, Mia Kirshner as the titular Elizabeth Short, (the less said about Rose McGowan's crrrrreaky cameo as a C list no talent -oh cruel irony- the better) is the most underused, relegated to fuzzy flashbacks and undemanding glimpses. Her one showcase scene, revealing the aspiring starlet's dearth of talent in an audition, is by far the movie's most beguiling, and the closest this farce ever gets to approximating noir's brooding, bestial belly.
Sadly only Fiona Shaw, here playing Swank's deranged mother, has the guts to play this as ridiculous as the plot. Conducting a shameless piece of hamtastic scene chomping, she treats the material like the pantomime it so blatantly is and almost resuscitates it through sheer force of will. Her final soliloquy is so stupendously shrill, it almost deafens you to the utter stupidity of what she is saying. What she is saying, by the way, is that little trifle we know as the entire freaking plot, crammed into five miserly minutes at the party end of the movie. I can practically hear Syd Field weeping over his Powerpoint presentations from here.
Nonetheless, Black Dahlia is very nearly a sublime piece of hokum. With the same dusky palette of LA Confidential, this is a cinematography drool fest, and De Palma’s liquid way with a camera remains intact. His knack for locating the most visceral elements of a scene, a frame, continues to impress. It's sad, then, that his propensity for finding the most effective visual tone does not extend to that of the content itself.
Indeed, there's a rather repugnant element to the unsteady pitch of Black Dahlia. So consistently melodramatic it could only ever have succeeded as gruesome black comedy-drama in the style of Whatever Happened To Baby Jane, the sad fact is this highly synthetic, rarefied cinema planet is supposed to concern the very real death of a very real girl.
Had the headline names been more fully in on this joke of a screenplay, Black Dahlia might have been more than transiently watchable. Unfortunately, as it stands, it has neither the grace for noir nor the guts for camp.
But the salient point is that there really shouldn't be a joke to be made here at all.
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