Movie making is like betting on horses. Breeding and track record don’t insure a winner.
This one is by Brian DePalma out of James Ellroy .
It includes all the requisite elements of LA Noir that worked so well in "Chinatown" "LA. Confidential" "True Confessions" and "Mulholland Falls": dark period post-war streets and night clubs, aura of illicit sex, Hollywood glamour, the smell of perversion and palms, corruption run amok among the police and the wealthy, sadism, blood, gore, complicated motives, a convoluted plot, femmes fatales, fedoras, rain, Packards, and coupes.
Its cast includes popular current stars Hillary Swank, Scarlett Johanssen, Mia Kershner, Aaron Eckhart and Josh Hartnett who seem enthused by the project.
Yet it runs a dreadful race and finishes way out of the money.
The 1947 murder case was the springboard for John Gregory Dunne’s novel on which a much better movie, “True Confessions,” was launched. There a mutilation murder of a stag film actress is investigated by the detective brother (Robert Duvall) of a monsigneur (Robert De Niro) of the local Catholic diocese. When the detective finds an influential Catholic layman (Charles Durning) is responsible, he has to choose between his duty and his brother’s career.
Here, the idea was going to be the friction between two friends who are detectives, one who is corrupt but obsessed with solving the murder, the other who is honest but obsessed with protecting his friend. The one gets murdered and the other solves the crime and in the process also solves the Black Dahlia murder. Along the way he falls for his friend’s sexy wife, suspects her of complicity in his friend’s murder, and gets sidetracked by a sexy, rich dame and her wealthy and powerful Chandleresque family with dirty secrets.
Somehow, neither the script nor the direction clarifies any of the above, filling in with mood stultifying exposition-filled voice overs. The film is heavily burdened by the conventions of the genre including sub-plots and seemingly disconnected plots that are supposed to weave together in a satisfying ironic conclusion, but somehow don’t.
As the original noir crime films showed, even an impenetrable mystery plot doesn't preclude success in the genre (the famous “The Big Sleep” paradox for example), if the director skillfully sets his mood, the script contains sufficient amusing dialogue and action, and the actors keep your interest. This one fails on all counts.
De Palma has always derived his style by stealing from his betters, Hitchcock, Hawks, and others. Here, he simply turned to Vilmos Zsigmond, his cameraman, said “noir” and began filming as if channeling Hawks, Nicholas Ray, and John Huston.
He shoots scenes from below, through window slats, curtained windows, rain spattered windows. There are shadows and slanting light. De Palma’s M.O. is to stint on coherence in favor of style. Here he forgot to include any style. His plants of clues and red herrings are so lazily transparent that we cease to care very early. Other plot turns are so obscure that there is no involvement in the mystery.
De Palma cares about none of it. Nor does he care about pace. There is no rhythm to the scenes; one merely follows another without concern for any affect. The film just keeps plodding along, like a dull shark.
De Palma even "quotes" his own film, "Scarface," with a bloody fall into a fountain, as if to remind us that he once had an idea of his own. However, this scene is preceded by a climb up a staircase by the detective who freezes and is unable to prevent a murder, a blatant theft from "Vertigo."
He has no new ideas for his actors either. Scarlett comes off as a too young version of Kim Basinger’s character in L.A. Confidential, Hartnett and Eckhart as weak versions of Crowe and Pearce. Hillary Swank is stranded as an almost laughable femme fatale. The four leads all appear to be pretending to be grown-ups, never for a moment convincing in their grandparents' clothes or adopting their hard boiled attitudes.
Mia Kirshner, who plays the victim in black and white film footage meant to be auditions and a stag film, manages to suggest vulnerability, reminiscent of Jennifer Connolly in a similar role in “Mulholland Falls,” but is never on for long enough. She should be a bigger star, which I first anticipated in Atom Egoyan's "Exotica" (1994).
The worst miscalculation is the campy playing of the wealthy family the detective falls into. Fiona Shaw (best known as the mean Aunt in the Harry Potter series), is awful as Swank’s dotty alcoholic mother, and Scottish actor John Kavannagh is almost as bad as the dad. The final expository mystery solution belongs more to a satire on the genre like Neil Simon’s “The Cheap Detective” or Steve Martin’s “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.” It includes the much overused flashbacks with the reveal of the face of the killer which had been hidden from us in previous shots --- with a contrived gender switch from the previously misleading scene.
Just terrible. Send this nag to the glue factory.
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