An attempted "Chinatown" shot from "The Black Dahlia."
I've been holding back my thoughts about Brian De Palma's "The Black Dahlia" since I saw it at the end of July, and now (especially after ten days at the Toronto Film Festival) those thoughts are more distant and disorganized than ever. I had intended to review the movie for RogerEbert.com, but that proved to be nigh impossible -- I've just been too busy with Toronto and other stuff, and I found the movie rather flat and ininspiring, so I didn't feel passionately motivated to write about it. (I'm still in Toronto as I write this.)
So, I'm going to offer just a few general comments (including some mild spoilers about particular shots and sequences), and then I'd very much like to hear your comments about the movie.
As I think back on the film, I'm surprised to find that the predominant color I associate with it is a rosy pink. Not black. Not blood red. But a mild color that Vilmos Zsigmond has used in his peculiar pastel palette for the film. That's not what I expected of a De Palma film of James Ellroy's "The Black Dahlia," but there it is. And somehow that characterizes what I think is wrong with the movie: After the first hour or so, which seems like a good set-up for a De Palma extravaganza, it grows pale and indistinct. From the start it's too controlled, rarely risky or dangerous. By the end, lots of people are getting shot (in pretty unimaginative ways for De Palma), just so it seems the filmmaker can hurry up and get the movie over with. Things fall apart. I didn't feel like De Palma cared about the picture anymore at this point, and so neither did I. You can feel the filmmaker losing interest in his own movie.
The set-pieces: The discovery of the Dahlia's body is a bravura shot that belongs with De Palma's best. It comes when you don't expect it -- during a shoot-out on the next block over, involving LAPD dicks Bucky (Josh Hartnett) and Lee (Aaron Eckhart). The camera cranes over the building up to the rooftop and, far below, away from the gunfire in mid-morning sunlight, we see a woman pushing a baby carriage toward a naked, segmented corpse in the grass. From here, we see the body shortly before she does -- but this seems to have nothing to do with the gunfight scene we've just been lifted out of. The woman's panic and horror is witnessed from this distant aerial vantage point, as she screams in alarm (and, with a nod to "Potemkin" and "The Untouchables," temporarily abandons the stroller). It will turn out, of course, that the shoot-out has everything to do with the Dahlia; we just don't see it yet.
My favorite scene is a bizarre dinner at the home of the wealthy, dotty, and undoubtedly corrupt Linscott family -- a twisted, hot-house outgrowth of something from "The Big Sleep." Bucky has met the movie's apparent femme fatale, Madeleine Linscott (Hillary Swank, smoldering in a way I've never seen her) at a lesbian nightclub, and gets invited home to meet the parents and little sis. These people are beyond eccentric -- they're the inbred (literally or figuratively) and insane products of high society. And what makes the scene (and particularly Fiona Shaw's unhinged performance) so wonderful is that, at the moment it's taking place, you have the feeling the movie could go just about anywhere from here -- tonally, narratively, cinematically. Unfortunately, the rest of the film is a long, slow, dispiriting downhill slide.
When Bucky goes to rendezvous with a shady character on a marble staircase, you know you're in for a multi-level set-piece. Lee is up above, struggling over the ballustrade with William Finley ("Phantom of the Paradise"), while Bucky is on the stairway, halfway between salvation and damnation. It's a set-up that's repeated back at the Linscott home, but to no particular effect.
The image that stays with me most when I think about "The Black Dahlia" isn't from the film itself, but from another De Palma film: "The Fury." I see a melding of Fiona Lewis spinning in the air, and John Cassavettes flying apart in all directions.
P.S. I'm distressed to report that Mark Isham -- a composer I usually like (especially his work for Alan Rudolph's "The Moderns," which I love -- has contributed two terrible unoriginal scores this year: a distractingly dull piece that lifts wholesale from Jerry Goldsmith's brilliant, last-minute music for "Chinatown" (trumpet and rustling strings) ; and the bombastic music for "Bobby" -- which caused some at the Toronto press screening to hiss his name when it appeared at the end of the film.
"Things fall apart. I didn't feel like De Palma cared about the movie anymore at this point, and so neither did I."
You may have hit the nail on the head here; I feel like every other critic (myself included) circled around this without quite pinning it down.
There's that last revelatory scene where everyone marches out and explains their motives. It's motivated by bullets, and most of the Bad People's ends are brought around by bullets, and it does feel like a rush job.
I can't say it surprised me, though. How Bleichert comes to his conclusions in the book is a much more natural and nuanced journey, versus the late-night cram session we get in that hallway scene. And not nearly so many of the Bad People end up on a slab, either. But it happened in L.A. Confidential, too, with the murder of James Cromwell's Dudley Smith. It's Hollywood, I guess, so the Bad People have to pay. Ellroy's version is much more cynical, and Smith is a recurring villain throughout the Quartet books that always gets away. Heroes, such as they are, come and go; evil is persistent. No movie yet based on an Ellroy work seems ready to make that statement.
That said, everything else worked for me. A lot of Blanchard's postmortem character development was truncated, as was a lot of the obsessive behavior everyone adopted about the Dahlia herself. I understand this is at least in part having to do with time constraints, and I'm having a harder time thinking of a better way to handle it.
You know how every film person has "those movies" that are flawed as all hell, and yet for some reason you enjoy it? A movie that usually you wouldn't forgive, but something about it clicked with you and, beyond logic(and often at the ridicule of other film-buff friends) you persist in liking it. A lot. For example...any Paul Verhoeven flick!
Well, that was me and "The Black Dahlia." I saw it tonight. I agree with you. The first third was on pace with "L.A. Confidential" or "Chinatown", but then it lost "steam" (read: coherence).
But, man, did it have style! Atmosphere! Juicy performances! And that DePalma camera! Was it messy? Oh, yeah. Do I have any idea why they burned Lee's body? Or who half of the characters were? No, I don't.
But I do know that I had a ton of fun watching this movie do it's thing...whatever that was.
I just wanted to comment on your criticism of Mark Isham's score... personally, I felt like it was a really tremendous effort. As a huge fan of film score music (I own over 500 scores), I've followed Isham's career with interest over the past decade or so, and enjoyed a lot of his work, particularly his jazzier effort on films like "Quiz Show" and "Afterglow". Here, for "The Black Dahlia", you cite his score as a rip-off of "Chinatown", but I really don't think that's fair. Isham's music draws heavily not only from "Chinatown", but from numerous famous noir scores, taking elements from each, thematically or instrumentation-wise, to form an original whole. Goldsmith and Herrmann play a large role in particular... in addition to "Chinatown", there are aspects of Goldsmith's "L.A. Confidential", Herrmann's "Vertigo", David Shire's overlooked "Farewell, My Lovely", and Leonard Bernstein's "On the Waterfront". In addition, Isham has a number of original ideas of his own... I found his use of a theremin to underscore some of De Palma's most over-the-top sequences just plain brilliant.
I feel the quality of film score music in general has decreased significantly in recent years with Hans Zimmer and his band of apprentices taking over every other film, and Isham's carefully constructed score sports the kind of musical craftsmanship I'd love to hear more often. Anyway, just my two cents on the matter. :-)
By the way, you're absolutely right about that dinner scene... I was quite excited about the movie's possibilities while watching that sequence.
Here's a comparison I bet you won't hear anyplace else. It's the evil twin of High School Musical. It's a bunch of pretty people on pretty sets playing out every bad cliche of its genre. It's eye candy, plain & simple.
There was also a scene toward the beginning that are impossible when you take into account later developments in the plot.
**SPOILERS**
The opening shot features Josh Hartnett in a locker room waiting for his big rematch with Aaron Eckhart. We hear the growing roar of the crowd and he comments in voiceover something to the effect of "You'd think we never fought before." About halfway through the film, Eckhart is killed, with no mention of an official rematch.
Could someone explain this to me please?
If anything, The Black Dahlia made me appreciate the adaptaion job Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland did on L.A. Confidential even more...There, they took an incredibly complex and dense novel and made a movie that didn't resort to an unimaginative overly expository voice-over nor did it feel choppy and rushed, a common flaw of bad adaptations. The Black Dahlia has those flaws...Ellroy's book is complex and involving, but the script falls short.
You're seeing the turkey for the feathers: this is probably the worst movie of the year. Bad movies are half of DePalma's career - I personally think he has a greater gift for making bad decisions than he does for making good ones - and if you can put the source material out of your mind, you'll see that this belongs in the tradition of Raising Cain and Mission to Mars as a hilariously awful attempt at drama by someone who does not seem to have met a real human being.
Having seen very few De Palma films (just the two Missions and Snake Eyes), I haven't gotten a feel of what he's about and what his films are really like, so I went into The Black Dahlia not knowing to expect. Throughout the first act, or hour, or so, I could tell that he was going somewhere with the feel and story (I sensed that a knowing hand was in control in one way or another), but halfway through, I knew the film had gotten lost. That usually happens when things stopped seeming serious and started feeling ridiculous, sometimes comical (and I wasn't the only one in the theater laughing).
And I find it strange that Jim loved the dinner scene, because I felt that the scene was completely out of character for the film, and I was quite annoyed by the fact that it was put in there. That scene, along with seeing cars in California with the steering wheel on the right side, made me hope, just for a moment, that the film has some sort of alternate, Mulholland Drive-style reality. Just for a moment though.
Oh, and re:the Bucky-Lee rematch, it was in the bathroom.
JE: I'd say the three scenes/sequences I singled out -- the shootout/discovery of the Dahlia's body; the demented family dinner; and the set-piece on the marble stairway -- are the three most characteristic of De Palma's work, the parts of the film where I thought he was really grooving. And the dinner scene absolutely belongs in Chandleresque noir, from "The Big Sleep" to "Chinatown," where these insane families are symptomatic of larger pathologies in society. I recommend some of De Palma's earlier films for greater perspective, especially: "Hi, Mom!," "Sisters," "Phantom of the Paradise," "Carrie," "The Fury," "Dressed to Kill," "Scarface," "The Untouchables," "Raising Caine"...
Regarding the "rematch" alluded to in a couple comments, I believe the line of dialog in the first scene was closer to this: "It wasn't the first time we fought together." Then the flashback shows the two street cops ending up in the midst of the riots, fighting back to back.
Chiming in generally, another huge De Palma fan was disappointed. But I'll wisely reserve final judgement until I revisit it. FEMME FATALE grew on me as well.
How could DePalma not see that the audience is not going to care about a 'villian' we've only seen once. (meaning the gardner)
Plus, you can TOTALLY tell that the -SPOILER- shadowed figure was Swank. She's got a man-jaw. A MAN-JAW!
The Black Dahlia is getting an undeserved bad rap. I acknowledge the flaws: Lee's sprial was unconvincing, and Scarlett Johansson showed about as much life as a tree stump.
But I loved the virtuosic shots like the already-mentioned scene in which the body is discovered: as the camera rotates from the body back to the street, we see that scandal and corruption surrounds the city. And especially I loved how De Palma reveled in film noir: how can we not appreciate that, immediately after sleeping with Swank's character, Harnett's character is wearing nothing but a fedora?
Sure, the plot twists and revelations don't floor us. But many great film noirs, from The Narrow Margin to Laura, had mundane denouements. Those films were more about the psychologies than the narratives. In The Black Dahlia, Bucky fights back against the city's corruption. But, by the film's end, he almost literally comes to live with it.