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The Black Dahlia
Cast to self-destruct, the film offers Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart as down and dirty police department pugilists, Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard, partners on the beat and in the fantasies of the mellifluously named Kay Lake (It-girl Scarlett Johannsen) – a homemaking temptress of nefarious past. While on the other side of town, Hilary Swank, wholly lacking in credibility in sex-kitten attire, brings camp to a new low as a slinky she-devil said to resemble the murdered actress, Elizabeth Short, nicknamed the Black Dahlia by the ever-ghoulish press. We see Short, herself (Mia Kirshner), only on the screen. It is the most affecting, and only worthwhile, performance in the film.
If Kay is somehow available to both Bleichert and Blanchard, though not always as we might imagine, Elizabeth, oft-called “Betty”, Short is unnervingly inaccessible to both. They come upon the body as it is discovered – in fascination and disgust – and for different reasons and in different ways, each gets caught up in the web of her mysterious undoing. She becomes the fourth in their game of doubles, the dark-hued negative to Kay’s blonde and beige presence. Bleichert in particular becomes enthralled with the celluloid image. Reels of the young actress unraveling – fragile in her hopes, tearful in her realizations – seem to reach us from a By mid-point in the The Black Dahlia, the plot – disjointed from the outset – begins to lurch and stammer incoherently. Oddness is piled atop oddity, and we get acres and acres too much of the godawful Swank in her drag queen impression, the ostensible, but unconvincing double of the dead Dahlia, inconceivably appealing to the bad boy side of the stone cold Bleichert. Swank’s Madeleine, sexual lowlife ominivore by way of a rich and dissolute clan with rich and dissolute clan dysfunctions, gives a kitschy-koo performance topped for what they now call ludicrosity only by the great Fiona Shaw, who plays Madeleine’s put-upon mother like a dripping painting on crack – all melting face and adrenaline spit. The film, already so low to the ground, nosedives from there. There are faint glimmers of hope in which De Palma’s trademark style visits down upon us, as if looking in from an earlier time, though even some of these bravura scenes play more as homage than creative vision. A tracking shot to the disemboweled body, a crow descending, a kitkat club number ©2006 Shari L. Rosenblum |
The pitch could have been perfect. Based on a work by James Ellroy, whose own lurid familial past fuels him with a sense of nightmare mania and dire circumstance, the film comes to us from the directorial hand of Brian De Palma, master technician of obsession most sensual. The time – a tick of the clock past World War II – filters cinematically through our collective memory in muted tones and quick repartee – angles, curves and shadows and promises of the dark. The place – L.A. , the underbelly of the Hollywood dream machine – flickers in our consciousness at the crossroads between glamour and seediness. The hook – the unsolved murder of a would-be starlet halved and stripped bare outside and in, legs splayed grotesquely in mock invitation, mouth sliced permanently into a monstrous bloody smile – seduces us with horror and ominous possibilities. And the story – featuring flipside femme fatales, dirty cops and a ménage à trois between fire and ice – is the stuff of which noir legends are made. But perfection proves elusive in the final cut: The [remarkably dull] Black Dahlia is the season’s surest narco-noir (Hollywoodland veritably bustles by comparison).
Nicknamed Mr. Ice for his cool under pressure, Bleichert becomes in Hartnett’s portrayal a near-somnambulist – his eyes barely moving even to adjust to the changes in the light. Hard-bodied though the actor may be, there is something too soft about his bearing. He does not fit his character’s backstory. It is Bleichert, innocent observer corrupted to the moment, who takes us through the tangled mess of rantings, allusions, and conspiracy theories running through the screenplay, written in the kitchen-sink style of adaptation by Josh Friedman (War of the Worlds), lifted in whole cloth and uncritically from Ellroy’s overwrought novel. Hartnett’s voice over – disembodied as it is – is more effective, in most cases, than his actions on the screen, but even with that he seems nearly as bored as we. Eckhart’s Blanchard is his counterpoint, a Mr. Fire of explosive temper and ugly secrets. At times spasmodic in his performance, at times announcing the hidden clues with anxious eyes, Eckhart has the misfortune of playing almost persuasively a character of totally unpersuasive design. And Johannsen, whom I always like, has never seemed more out of touch with her character’s age. Kay Lake is a character with a history, but Johanssen seems barely out of high school. In picture form in her sweaters and her skirts, cigarette in hand, plush lips and full bodied, she looks nonetheless like a little girl at play in her mother’s closet. Still, her postures approximate the poses of noir screen sirens like Stanwyck and Bacall, hips jutted out, arms half extended, lips apout. But in motion, there is always the sense she might teeter and fall. And if her raspy, breathy voice gives the right delivery to the suggestive come-ons she throws around, the sophistication never reaches her eyes. 
different film. Mia Kirshner captures the essence of hope in despair, making herself tiny, backing further and further away from the camera and the unseen director, into the wall, pulling her legs to her chest like a child in self-defense. We hear De Palma’s voice ask intermittent questions. The probing director absent from the rest of the film before us.
featuring k.d. lang, film flashes and a twisting staircase in a plot contortion all show signs of the director’s once-hotly celebrated virtuosity. Alas, though, more often than not, his hand is restrained to the point of torpor, and the discretion that his camera grants gracefully to the actress’s tortured body on the side of the road expands to an impersonal distance between his story and his audience. We are so far detached from the players on the screen that the film’s concluding paragraphs, wrapping up the storylines in rambling inanities as they do, fail either to stun us or confirm our expectations. Even in those rare moments when the contrivances make sense, we simply do not care.