director
Brian De Palma
screenwriter
Josh Friedman
based on
the novel by
James Ellroy
producers
Rudy Cohen
Moshe Diamant
Art Linson
cinematographer
Vilmos Zsigmond
music
Mark Isham
editor
Bill Pankow
cast
Josh Hartnett (Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert)
Scarlett Johansson (Kay Lake)
Aaron Eckhart (Lee Blanchard)
Hilary Swank (Madeleine Linscott)
Mia Kirshner (Elizabeth Short)
Mike Starr (Russ Millard)
Fiona Shaw (Ramona Linscott)
Patrick Fischler (Ellis Loew)
Jemima Rooper (Lorna Mertz)
Rose McGowan (Sheryl Saddon)
William Finley (George Tilden)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 121m
u.s.
release: 9/15/06
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other brian
de palma films
reviewed on this website:
- mission:
impossible
- snake eyes
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Morose yet flamboyant, overstuffed
with stylistic flourishes that dazzle even as they baffle, Brian
De Palma's The Black Dahlia is sure to appear on many
critics' year-end lists -- ten best and ten worst. De Palma is
an obsessional craftsman; at his best, he uses his peerless technique
to put you inside his characters' paranoia and anguish. This
time, though, he's working with someone else's obsession, and
he never really gets inside it himself -- he just presents it
with a gloss. De Palma and scripter Josh Friedman miss the tone
and flavor of James Ellroy's hard-charging novel -- its bebop
prose, its toxic mix of lust and shame, its genesis in the still-unsolved
murder of Ellroy's own mother. Ellroy's book was felt, painfully,
from the inside; De Palma's movie is filmed from the outside.
The premise is the same: Los
Angeles cops Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert (Josh Hartnett)
and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart), former boxing opponents, get
drawn into the case of the Black Dahlia -- Elizabeth Short (Mia
Kirshner), a wannabe actress who fumbled through the nightlife
and screen tests of bottom-feeder Hollywood before ending up
mutilated and cut in half, looking like someone's demented science
project. In the book, narrated by Dwight, the cops' love lives
are warped by the case; it turns Lee into a monomaniacal obsessive,
swallowing benzedrines and littering his dining-room table with
Elizabeth's autopsy photos. The movie follows that track, too,
but nothing is as starkly compelling as the glimpses of sad-eyed
Elizabeth, gamely smiling through tears in some director's office.
The movie starts off top-heavy,
devoting more screen time than expected to Dwight and Lee's boxing
match, staged in order to get the public to vote for a budget
increase for the police department. Ellroy wanted us to see the
intersection between law and politics, cops maiming each other
for the city's elite. But the way De Palma shoots it, it's just
his homage to old boxing pictures. The entire movie, in fact,
is his homage to old movies. Cosmetically, he's a good match
for this material; in classics like Blow Out and Casualties
of War, De Palma focused on young, untested men haunted
by women they couldn't save. But here he just seems motivated
by getting to wallow in a lush period setting (the late forties)
for the first time since The Untouchables almost twenty
years ago.
Playing in his sandbox of the
past, De Palma forgets about his talented cast, who struggle
to forge some reality inside the movie's stylized scheme. The
women, trying to mimic the heavy-lidded seductiveness of past
screen legends, come off worst; Scarlett Johansen, as Lee's platonic
companion, and Hilary Swank, as a bisexual rich girl Dwight gets
involved with, are terribly miscast. (Especially since we keep
hearing how much Swank's character looks like Elizabeth, though
she clearly doesn't.) De Palma fills the margins with old favorite
actors -- it's fun to see Gregg Henry and William Finley again,
though the former is reduced to glowering at the camera and then
disappearing -- and interesting performers like Rose McGowan
and Fiona Shaw (going waaay over the top as a batty matron)
keep turning up. But none of it coheres. We don't share the main
characters' inner conflicts because the director, usually such
a strongly visual artist, resorts to telling us about
them (if you blink, you miss the reason why Lee is so fixated
on the Dahlia case).
The Black Dahlia won't do much to dissuade the common
rap against De Palma as a cold technician who takes projects
just for the elaborate set pieces they provide him - here it's
yet another staircase sequence (The Untouchables, Carlito's
Way) topped by yet another fall into a fountain (Scarface).
De Palma keeps himself amused -- sporadically -- but elsewhere
stages things lazily, ladling an overly rambunctious Mark Isham
score over everything. The movie is De Palma's essay on film
noir technique, and some of his hardcore followers may enjoy
it on that level, but most of The Black Dahlia is neither
entertaining nor compelling. James Ellroy made this material
work -- by crude, brutal force -- because he believed in it.
Brian De Palma only believes in its surface, and that's where
the movie stays and dies.
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