By Matt Zoller Seitz
“Do you think you’re capable of playing sadness?” an unseen director asks a wannabe actress and future murder victim, in screen test footage that recurs throughout Brian DePalma’s The Black Dahlia.
“Sure,” she replies, her voice steady but her mind elsewhere. “I can do that.”
And so can De Palma, who provides the voice of that soft-spoken yet menacing director. One of the filmmaker’s most ambitious and formally complex films, The Black Dahlia is, above all else, a tragedy -- and not just for the abovementioned Hollywood actress, Elizabeth Short (Mia Kirshner), whose unsolved 1947 murder-mutilation in served as the basis for countless movies and books, including DePalma’s source material, James Ellroy's 1987 novel. (Be warned: this review is all spoilers.) Ellroy’s book wove a fictional mystery around Short’s murder. Both a pastiche and a critique, it used Raymond Chandler-styled purple prose knowingly and ironically, cluing the reader to see through Chandler’s smoky machismo and understand that the same male swagger that’s sanctified via the hardboiled fiction hero exists in the real world, where it enables sexism, racism, xenophobia and the subjugation of the poor by the rich.
Screenwriter Josh Friedman’s adaptation frames the story within a heavily narrated extended flashback by ex-boxer turned L.A. police detective Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett), who tries to solve Short’s seemingly random killing with help from his partner, Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart), and drifts ever closer to two women, kinky socialite Madeleine Linscott (Hilary Swank) and Lee’s blond goddess girlfriend, Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson). At first the film plays like Chinatown-style modern noir, in which the investigation of a singular horror reveals corruption within families, institutions and communities. But The Black Dahlia soon reveals itself as something more: the story of a young man discovering his moral code, then realizing how useless it is in the face of society-wide indifference, greed and cruelty.
De Palma translates Ellroy’s dick-swinging dialectics into his own, decidedly more sensitive aesthetic, with its alternately subjective and omniscient camerawork, attraction-repulsion to brutality, and simultaneous indulgence and rebuke of the male gaze. That’s no big surprise; anyone familiar with both artists already suspected they were kindred spirits. What is surprising, though, is the way DePalma re-imagines Ellroy’s worldview and clarifies his intent. The movie version of Dahlia shatters the tough guy façade of Ellroy’s fiction and exposes the author as a depressive romantic who hides behind ass-kicking hepcat prose, just as his Neanderthal heroes wrap themselves in stoicism, homoerotic competitiveness, tribal loyalty and gallows humor, stunting their human potential to shield themselves against hurt. Most impressively, the film foregrounds the book’s political consciousness (a trait often missed by Ellroy’s fans and detractors alike) and magnifies its core emotions: disgust at the treatment of the powerless by the powerful, and furious sadness at the realization that there’s not much an individual can do to stop it. These are the touchstones of tragedy, and to watch this film is to realize – or be reminded – that DePalma’s sensibility is tragic more often than not. _________________________________
The film is broken into three distinct sections. Section one starts with an unusually subdued De Palma opening shot, set in the bowels of a stadium on fight night; it locates the gloved-up Bucky in wide shot, then slowly moves in for a close-up, always leaving room in the composition for a poster on the wall behind Bucky that trumpets the match as a battle of “Fire” and “Ice.” Those elemental nouns don’t just describe the temperament of the two cops; they’re a key to understanding DePalma’s aesthetic, which is fueled by similar tensions. 
The director is fully engaged with Bucky’s emotions – which is at it should be, since the story is told from Bucky’s POV – and there are times when the film openly sympathizes with him. (Hartnett’s solid screen presence – world-weary yet curiously innocent, like John Travolta’s Jack Terry in Blow Out -- is just right for a DePalma tragedy, and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond lights his woodcut face for iconic impact; wreathed in cigarette smoke, he looks like the young Chet Baker.) We learn of Bucky’s partnership with Lee, a fellow ex-boxer turned cop who first bonded with him during the Zoot Suit riots of 1942; his professional progress within the LAPD (a supervisor refers to him as “a bright penny”); his sublimated love for both Kay and Lee, which creates a Jules and Jim-type triangle; Bucky and Lee’s investigation of the Short murder, which at first centers on a known sex offender, then gravitates toward less obvious suspects; and Bucky’s go-along-to-get-along attitude, which leads him to take a dive during the Fire-and-Ice fight so he can afford to support his senile dad, and leads to future compromises.
This is a lot of information packed into about 40 minutes; most of it deals directly with Bucky’s personality, past and present. But even though DePalma stays inside his protagonist’s head, he never ignores the larger forces conspiring against his happiness--forces that Bucky is only beginning to understand in hindsight. As Bucky rifles through his own memories – and imagines what might have happened to Short – DePalma appears to leave the hero’s point-of-view, often via crane shots that survey whole rooms, blocks or neighborhoods. But although these techniques imply a shift from subjective first person to godlike third person, the movie never actually makes that transition. In time, the viewer comes to understand that the film’s seemingly omniscient flourishes are meant to visualize the inner workings of Bucky’s grief-stricken mind – a mind that never stops connecting Bucky’s situation to the wider world. When we watch The Black Dahlia, we’re not seeing what Bucky sees; we’re seeing what he feels, and his own unvoiced explanation for those feelings. 
Like a self-aware dream that decodes itself as it goes along, The Black Dahlia's expressionistic imagery describes a man’s attempt to understand his own pain, and the social forces that brought it into existence. The film treats Short’s demise as a byproduct of her society’s hierarchy of oppression (rich folks on the roof, straight white men on the top floor, everyone else in the cellar); then it demonstrates that both Short’s murder and its subsequent exploitation by the media, the LAPD and Hollywood were born in the same dark places. The grandest example is a lengthy, uncut, high-angled tracking shot that connects two crimes: a bank robbery-cum-shootout with black perps that the cops care about, because it involves a rich man’s money; and the discovery of Short’s violated body nearby, an offense the LAPD likely would have round-filed if Short weren’t young, white and gorgeous, like so many young women clinging to the fringes of the film business.
Bucky’s realization of his own helplessness is predicted in the scenes where Bucky watches Short in a girl-on-girl stag film shot on a soundstage originally built for Conrad Veidt’s The Man who Laughs (a film also viewed by Bucky, Lee and Kay) and in the aforementioned screen test footage, which finds Short indulging her director’s invasive chatter because she has no choice. (De Palma’s verbal dissection of Short predicts her gutted and vandalized corpse, visually linking filmmakers and killers.) Kirshner’s remarkable performance--like Naomi Watts’ Mulholland Drive audition scene writ large--mixes obedience, in-the-moment intensity, actressy flirting, and a sad facsimile of girlish sweetness. You know you’re not seeing a woman lose her innocence because DePalma and Kirshner make it clear that she lost it long ago.
The spiritual deflowering is all Bucky’s. As he watches Short’s screen tests, he becomes entranced by her ghostly image, and pursues justice in hopes of reclaiming her goodness and strengthening his. Like the heroes of other obsessive necrophiliac love stories – including Laura, Vertigo and De Palma’s own Body Double – Bucky works through, and also evades, his dawning sense of helplessness by falling in love with a murdered woman and figuratively trying to resurrect her. It's a doomed quest. As Bucky burrows deeper into the city’s underbelly, Short’s murder begins to seem a redundant postscript – the annihilation of a woman who was already dead in spirit — and a harbinger of Bucky’s own journey: his birth, maturation and death as a moral force.
_______________________________
Section Two of The Black Dahlia charts Bucky’s fling with Madeleine Linscott, a rich, bisexual, nightclub-crawling friend of Short’s (played by an uncharacteristically glam Swank, who undresses Hartnett with her eyes and snaps off her sentences like Bette Davis’ hot-to-trot baby cousin). As Bucky lets himself become ensnared by Madeleine (a vertigo-inducing name), he drifts into the orbit of her family, a clan so comfortable with its own grotesquerie they could have been sketched by Charles Addams. Bucky’s first meeting with Madeline’s parents is one of the great De Palma tracking shots, a setpiece that belatedly achieves the satirical tone De Palma’s Bonfire of the Vanities botched. It’s also the most convincing use of first-person camerawork since the celebrated Goodfellas sequence where Henry Hill greeted his fellow mobsters. The camera observes Madeleine opening the front door of her father’s house and leading Bucky inside, briefly dips down to check out her assets (this is Bucky’s POV, after all), then rises up to meet her cheerful monster of a daddy (John Kavanaugh) and her boozy, scatterbrained, thoroughly disapproving mother (Fiona Shaw, in a risky, super-stylized performance that teeters on the knife-edge of mental breakdown).
On paper, Ellroy’s depiction of wealthy freaks living beyond the reach of society’s laws was no mere detective fiction trope; the author’s disgust was palpable. But De Palma goes Ellroy one better by framing the Short case’s richest suspects as participants in a satirical black comedy that looks like Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind by way of Mad TV – privilege re-imagined as burlesque. Critics who complain that these scenes feel incongruous, glib or exaggerated are forgetting that we’re not seeing “reality,” but a grief-stricken blue-collar cop’s remembrance of it. Much more so than the film’s gallery of foulmouthed Runyonesque street types, the Linscotts are gargoyles to Bucky – monsters of entitlement. 
As Madeline grows to dominate Bucky’s thoughts and actions, the Bucky/Lee/Kay triangle gets shunted to the film’s margins. Lee is diminished and Kay all but vanishes. This tactic may seem like a mistake, but it retrospectively makes sense in section three, after Bucky’s gotten hip to the breadth and depth of the corruption around him – including his buddy Lee, who was secretly entangled with the Linscott family and their Noah Cross-like schemes. Bucky chases his leads to their appalling conclusion; he also re-enters Kay’s life a more energized, passionate man, and enacts the romantic fantasy he’s nurtured privately for years. But we can’t cheer Bucky on because we understand (as he does) that he’s indulging a variant of necrophilia. Once content to treat his best friend’s girl as a running buddy and platonic crush, he now views her as an angel – a purified version of Elizabeth Short and Madeleine Linscott; an emblem of the unexpressed love he felt for his now-dead partner, and a redeemer who will cleanse his sins and numb his pain.
Unfortunately, Bucky’s trying to replace emotions and character traits that are lost forever – a notion planted early on when Bucky’s loses his namesake choppers in his publicity match with Lee, then gets fitted for false teeth. This is the first in a series of such losses, and an indicator of De Palma’s moral calculus -- a point made visually at ringside with a slow zoom shot of a tooth that got knocked from Bucky’s mouth and landed beside a bloody scorecard. Irreparable damage, irreplaceable loss and unfathomable violence are the three true stars of The Black Dahlia; their presence lends De Palma’s film a weight that few retro crime thrillers (including L.A. Confidential) can muster. 
But while De Palma’s tone is mostly somber, the filmmaking is ecstatic, and sly, too. Friedman’s script makes room for distinctively De Palma touches, including paintings, movies, mirrors and similar objects and characters arranged in sets of two and three. The director seizes these opportunities with gusto. He’s one of the few filmmakers who can make a joke without words: Short’s freewheeling kid sister traipsing through a park clad in little Shirley Temple’s “Good Ship Lollipop” outfit; Mrs. Linscott’s batty final monologue, which is lit and framed to suggest a an early Technicolor melodrama; Bucky’s visit to a lesbian bar where line dancers sashay and a Marlene Dietrich figure (played by k.d. lang) croons “Love for Sale.” Elsewhere, De Palma’s patterns and juxtapositions are more unsettling. Strengthening the film’s themes of loss and disfigurement, De Palma links the maimed hero of The Man Who Laughs; a suspect’s obsessive painting of that same character; Short’s corpse, whose mouth was cut from ear to ear in an obscene parody of a grin, and the hero’s dental prosthesis (the doc who installs it crows, “Just look at that smile now!”) As always, De Palma explores cinema’s voyeuristic tendencies, and the coldly male, often dehumanizing aspect of that gaze. When possible, he denies the viewer a defineable vantage point; you’re often unbalanced, unsure if you’re looking at “reality,” its representation (movies, photographs) or its reflection (in windows and mirrors). The first image of Bucky and Lee after the zoot suit riots is a medium shot of the partners reflected in a mirror; you only realize it’s a mirror if you look at the top of the image and see the slight distortion caused by glass joining the mirror’s frame line. Bucky’s clinches with Madeline and Kay are delineated by window frames or viewed through the windows of front doors, so that we feel like peeping toms. First-person shots of Bucky staring at Kay and Madeleine (and Short’s filmed image) are disrupted when the woman looks into the camera, implicitly challenging Bucky’s (and our) privileged viewpoint.
Most striking of all is De Palma's use of composition and camera movement to suggest the right moral response to savagery. In two scenes involving Short's corpse -- its discovery by the LAPD and a subsequent coroner's report -- Zsigmond gracefully cranes down from a loftily detached position (a God's eye view) to a subjective one (Short's POV, looking up at the men scrutinizing her ravaged body). In the space of seconds, we go from objectifying Short to feeling for her -- the hero's moral evolution in microcosm. That any attentive viewer could sit through this film -- or its spiritual sister, Casualties of War -- and still think De Palma hates women is inconceivable.
Zsigmond employs a slightly desaturated color palette throughout, a choice that initially seems to work against the film’s lavish period details and De Palma’s preference for hyper-reality. But the choice justifies itself in the movie’s final scene, which finds Bucky returning to Kay’s house, battered in mind and spirit. She appears in her doorway bathed in angelic light – the brightest thing in a very dark film. But then Bucky looks over his shoulder and hallucinates seeing Short’s disfigured corpse, at which point the color scheme becomes desaturated again. Bucky will see that dead woman as long as he lives. Justice won't bring her back to life, and no matter how diligently he tries to submerge that dreadful image – to forget and heal and move on – it will remain in his memory and erupt when he least expects it. “Nothing stays buried forever,” Bucky tells us early in the The Black Dahlia; by the end, he realizes just how right he was.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
All is loss: Brian DePalma's The Black Dahlia
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This sounds like an astounding adaptation of Mr. Ellroy's book, which I just love .. I can't wait to see this one!
Holy cow! I love the book and wasn't happy about the casting choices and expected an abortion of a film, but I'm really excited to see it now, based on your review. I have to disagree with you about Ellroy, though. I've always felt that his prose was a deliberate facade, much like the swagger of his characters always hides their wounded and battered true natures. "My Dark Places" was Ellroy's admission that his characters were reflections of his own false externalities and that he spent most of his life cultivating a bullshit image to keep from dealing with his mother's murder. I'll write more once I've seen the film, but I'm happy to see that DePalma hasn't been constrained by his studio. I always thought he'd make a good director for this story, but his more recent output had me doubting his abilities.
The one thing that doesn't change in Ellroy is his protagonists and how their own twisted sense of right and wrong pushes them over the line, careening straight into the void, as if it is the fulfillment of some feverish desire. An apotheosis of a sort.
I skimmed your piece, Matt, I've already read too much about this film. I have to see it. Hartnett being in this thing is still upsetting to me, however.
I read an interview where DePalma remarked how he's always been dogged by complaints about the "inconsistencies of logic" in his film. A complaint, he says, that would never be made about David Lynch, and he wonders how this has come to be. I doubt from what I've read (David Edlestein, Manola Darghis) that this complaint will go away any time soon.
Tully says, "I've always felt that his prose was a deliberate facade, much like the swagger of his characters always hides their wounded and battered true natures." I agree with that and tried to express a similar sentiment in this piece, although perhaps it didn't come through. I think we agree that Ellroy's Raymond Chandler-on-mean-pills prose isn't supposed to be taken literally, but ironically. His men act invulnerable to hide their weakness and lay claim to the privileges endowed on them by white male dominated postwar America. And yes, "My Dark Places" is a great book -- Ellroy's best, in my opinion, though I've only read six of them, so you have to take that with a grain of salt.
kj: Most of De Palma's movies feel more like dreams than straight narrative stories. They digress and repeat for effect, and linger over powerful emotions, iconic images and ironic observations. I don't hold them to the standards of "realistic" films (though that label is open to debate). The only thing that matters is whether the film makes sense on its own terms -- if it observes the rules it set for itself, never takes thematic or narrative shortcuts to make things easier on the storyteller, and otherwise avoids doing anything that flat-out feels wrong in context. Some of De Palma's movies fall afoul of the latter criteria -- it irritated me, for instance, that Snake Eyes didn't fully exploit its environment of total surveillance, telling you that all those video cameras mattered when the plot needed them to, rather than all the time; likewise it irritated me that De Palma visualized the extraterrestrials at the end of Mission to Mars in such a prosaic way, with what seemed like poor special effects even at that time (I wish he'd taken a page from Kubrick in 2001 and Spielberg in Close Encounters and shown us less). That said, there's splendor and invention in both of those movies, and when I watch them again, the things that bugged me recede and I only notice what's pleasurable.
A general P.S. -- Unfortunately I'm in the extreme minority on this one, so please don't read my enthusiasm as being indicative of the film's critical response. The only critic I know who admired the film as much as I did is House contributor Keith Uhlich, whose Slant Magazine review is here. That said, I really do think that this film, like Eyes Wide Shut, will hold up well over time, and as people get a chance to revisit it again with no preconceptions, they'll pay closer attention to the movie's intricate architecture and lovely grace notes.
For more on De Palma, see Slant Magazine's special section Auteur Fatale (which includes Keith Uhlich's review of The Black Dahlia.)
See also De Palma a la Mod (which includes lots of links) and the 24 Lies a Second forum.
I was so disappointed to come out of the press screening of this movie here in Vegas to discover that I was the only person who really liked the film (or even liked it at all). And it's been sad to me to watch the Rotten Tomatoes rating steadily drop as more reviews are added. Your review and Keith Uhlich's at Slant are nice validations that there really is something powerful and important going on De Palma's film
Josh: Agreed. And now let's hear this late-breaking bulletin from The Department of You Gotta Be Fucking Kidding Me.
Matt,
This is an excellent analysis of 'The Black Dahlia' and an intelligent look at De Palma's style, which is too often written off as an example style over substance.
I was impressed by the film too and I wrote an enthusiastic review, but here in the UK, it looks like I'm in the minority too (so I sympathise with you and Josh).
This article last week, wherein DePalma categorizes The Black Dahlia as work-for-hire, diminished my expectations for the film.
Manohla Dargis's negative review this morning reinvigorated my expectations as she needed to make explicit her dislike of the political content of DePalma's films: "he’s better when playing within the strict confines of genre, and in the key of pop, than when trying his hand at heavy reality, as he did in the lugubrious Vietnam drama 'Casualties of War.' Reality weighs similarly heavy on 'The Black Dahlia.'" She and I appear to have a fundamental disagreement regarding DePalma's oeuvre.
"The Black Dahlia" is either the weakest or second-weakest entry in Ellroy's L.A. quartet depending on one's opinion of Ellroy's experiments in "White Jazz." The explicit socio-political content that enriches "The Big Nowhere" and "L.A. Confidential" is mostly latent in "The Black Dahlia." That Dargis mentions that the film adaptation engages with reality (something no review I can recall of the uneven but blatantly and pointedly satirical Snake Eyes deigned to mention) suggests that DePalma adds some of the social and historical freight that Ellroy was not yet able to mix successfully with his fevered depictions of violent, masculine self-destruction.
Or, at least, here's hoping.
Matt, I wish you hadn't posted that last link, because now I'll have that nonsense in my head like a bad song for the rest of the day.
Overlooked in most discussions about the film is that De Palma’s “Scarface” is a modern remake of the 1932 version directed by Howard Hawks and Richard Rosson, of which the script was adapted by Hawks and Ben Hecht from a novel by Armitage Trail.
What the hell does this have to do with anything?
Matt, your front-line defense of the film is spectacular and much appreciated; this is the best analysis I've yet seen about the film.
Matt, I'm looking forward to reading your review but have decided to wait until I see the film on Tuesday (it's as fast as I can manage to get to it). But I have to say I'm really glad to hear that you thought highly of it, and I'm looking forward to commenting here and writing about it myself when I get the opportunity next week. I linked to Keith's review, alongside Armond White's and David Edelstein's, and will now add yours as well.
But that garbage on MSNBC.com-- Jesus, will these tiresome canards about De Palma that get resurrected every time he releases a movie never die? In the long history of misguided articles about De Palma this has got to be one of the worst, but at least the author manages to add some new ornaments to the mythology:
"Usually when De Palma's directorial chops are mentioned, the film that comes to mind is Scarface..."
"The two primary tasks of a director are to get the script in shape and then cast them movie well. After that a trained chimpanzee could at least deliver a workmanlike rough cut."
And finally, we find out that it was Carlito's Way that "probably" brought De Palma more respect among cinephiles.
If De Palma is simply a gun for hire, what does that make the fella that wrote this dreck?
I haven't seen it yet -- but here's my generic DePalma comment. Those elaborate set pieces almost always kill me. Things like the excruciating and overwrought span of time before releasing the pigs blood in Carrie, the Potemkin sequence in The Untouchables, and that crazy 3-level set piece business in Raising Cain. They do feel inevitable and preordained. A part of our brain says this is ridiculous and absurd, but it's too late - we're already locked in. We know it's a dream and yet we can't wake up.
Black Dahlia is decent DePalma. You can feel the personal connection he has with the material, but he seems to be a little intimidated by it. The wild-ass theatrics we expect from a DePalma movie are mostly abscent. You have the opening zoot suit riot and boxing match. There's the shoot-out that leads to the discovery of the body. There's the POV of Bucky meeting the Linscott family. And there's the stairway shot-out. These are good scenes but a little routine. The POV scene is a small pasterpiece, but it feels truncated. It would've been better if the whole dinner sequence was done in this fashion.
You can tell DePalma considers the movie to be a serious take on the key themes of his movies. The problem is that he's already done better variations on these themes and motifs. Blow Out and Casualties of War (and to a lesser extent Body Double) deal with morality and corruption in more profound ways. This doesn't take away from the pleasures of The Black Dahlia.
The performance by Josh Hartnett is pretty astonishing in its empathy. It's ranks with Travolta's work in Blow Out. It's what Craig Wasson was attempting in Body Double. The more he grows a conscience the more he's out of his depth. It's what makes the final scene so devastating. He realizes how much he's lost and how much he's going to continue to lose.
The other great performance is by Fionna Shaw as Mrs. Linscott. Her two scenes have more humor, suspense and sadness that the rest of the movie feels small in comparison. DePalma gives a great voice performance as the asshole director. He brings a lifetime of interrogations to his simple improvisations.
The Black Dahlia deserves to be seen but for totally different reasons. It's a study of a director coming to terms with the idea of the male gaze and what it has meant to him as a filmmaker over the years.
It's interesting that Black Dahlia arrives just one week after the far superior Hollywoodland. That movie also deals with the connections between sex, murder, fame, and self-preservation. The difference is that George Reeves achieved a decent amount of success. The fact that he wasn't very talented is what makes his anihilation so tragic. Reeves achieved fame but he knew he hadn't earned it. Reeves achieved fame before notoriety. Elizabeth Smart only achieved notoriety. Yes, there is a diffenece. It's what separates a great Hollywood movie like Hollywoodland from a watchable one like The Black Dahlia.
Wow. Superbly reasoned, Matt. I've been struggling with my own response to Dahlia, and wasn't happy with where I ended up mostly because, when I saw it last week (my only viewing thus far), I failed to get on the film's wavelength in the early going and felt like I was playing thematic catch-up throughout. The heavy use of narration and surplus of dialogue threw me, and I immediately started to view Dahlia as lesser De Palma. Sure, the master's hand was evident, and the elements were familiar, but the story just didn't feel like it was being told visually. When Armond White conceded that it wasn't top-tier De Palma, I felt a tad vindicated.
Your review blew that all to smithereens. I'll be at the theater first thing tomorrow. I'm still not sold on Hartnett, and doubt I'll ever be, but that's all subjective.
And that MSNBC piece made me quake with rage. That writer's previous piece was on the Redstone/Cruise dust-up; he shouldn't be assessing Howard Deutch's oeuvre, much less De Palma's.
Regarding the MSNBC piece: What really gets me isn't just the way-off-base assertions about what De Palma does and what he represents, but the whole context of the piece: is De Palma up or down in Hollywood, what does Hollywood think of De Palma, is his career a success or failure based on critical response and box office reciepts, etc.
None of that stuff has anything to do with what's onscreen, and what's onscreen is what separates a filmmaker from a mere director.
I don't love everything De Palma does, but even when I dislike a film or part of a film, I have to respect his technique, originality, sincereity, consistency of vision and willingness to explore and enlarge that vision. And I believe that's what he's doing in The Black Dahlia -- trying not just to revisit some of his favorite themes, images and situations, but to rethink his entire aesthetic from top to bottom.
I understand why there is so much critical hostility/bewilderment/disappointment in this movie. It's not like anything he's given us before. You can't compare it to anything else he's done except at the level of plot and characterization -- i.e., in terms of literary values.
But in this movie he's not just presenting the universe subjectively, he is constructing a subjective universe from the words out -- something he's never done before, not even in Bonfire and Carlito's Way, both of which were also heavily narrated. Here the narration isn't riding on top of the images -- which is the case in 99 percent of narrated movies, even ones where the narration and pictures are at odds. Rather, the narration is the movie's DNA, the seed that enables its existence and that dictates its form, rhythm and tone.
Except for Oliver Stone in JFK, I can't think of another recent example of an artistically significant Hollywood filmmaker rethinking his entire aesthetic, and everything his career has meant, within the context of a single film. This isn't just an adaptation of The Black Dahlia, it's De Palma's own very personal equivalent of My Dark Places.
I really wish I hadn't read the book before seeing the movie. I am a DePalma fan, generally. Seeing Blow Out for the first time as a teenager was a major epiphany for me. But my reaction to Dahlia was decidedly lukewarm. There were some great moments. Mia Kirshner and Fiona Shaw were both amazing, but it's almost like their performances--their scenes--belong in a different movie. I hated the derisive, superior way the people at the all-media screening were snickering at the film. Whatever you want to say about the filmmaker, I'm pretty sure nothing got onto the screen by accident. He knows what's baroque and over-the-top and monstrous in the film better than you do. I kept waiting for that scene, like the drill scene in Body Double, that shuts up all the childish giggling, but it never really came. Still, I would rather see something I consider an interesting failure by DePalma than any of the lesser films of Spielberg, Scorsese, or Coppola. That the guy who wrote that piece for MSNBC is an idiot whose lack of understanding of cinematic art and the filmmaking process is monumental is no big deal. The world is full of such types. That someone paid him for it and posted it to their website is a bit upsetting.
I know it's unfair and meaningless to compare the DePalma's film with Ellroy's book, really, but just in terms of story, I wonder if I would have understood and appreciated the movie's plot better had I not been expecting things to go so differently. In any case, I'm sure I'll take another look someday when I have the time. In the meantime, when I think of The Black Dahlia, I'll be thinking about the novel.
I don't want to keep piling on the MSNBC piece. It's scapegoating one writer for tendencies that have cropped up in a lot of features and reviews related to Dahlia, plus, I've gotten my carcass kicked around websites a few times, and I know it's no fun. The larger point is that I sincerely believe this movie represents an evolutionary leap forward for De Palma, or at least a right turn into previously uncharted territory, and for the most part, his bravery has been met with variants of the following reactions: (1) " Who is this director, and what has he done with Brian De Palma?" (2) "It's a De Palma movie, only not fun" and (3) "You're a great director, Mr. De Palma, and I really hope I like your next movie." This is a confident, challenging, and (for me, at least) haunting work of popular art, and it deserves to be met and judged on its own terms; that it's being judged in relation to what we expect from De Palma seems unfair.
Matt: Like you, I don't unconditionally love every De Palma film, but there's always a rigorous intelligence at work in his pictures; the style always counts for something. And I agree with you that De Palma seems to be developing key themes here, not just revisiting them. I've written a review of 'The Black Dahlia', which briefly discusses some of these points. The review is available here:
http://www.6degreesfilm.com/reviews.php?id=803
As for the MSNBC piece, it's just another example of a viewer looking at De Palma's films but not seeing what's there. According to the writer of the piece, De Palma is "...a shooter, not an artist." This is just the same old 'style over substance' criticism that has been hurled at De Palma throughout his career.
mdb: Thank you for that link. You make some valuable points in the review, particularly this one:
"Like the protagonists in De Palma's Blow Out (1981), Body Double (1984) and Snake Eyes (1998), Bucky is obsessed with a mystery and repeatedly returns to film footage to try and solve the puzzle. But while Bucky watches screen-tests of Elizabeth (played by Mia Kirshner) to sift for clues, they are more than simply evidence in a murder case. De Palma seems to be commenting on the exploitation of women by Hollywood (where the dreams of many wannabe stars are crushed), the consumption of images of women in the media, and the pressure women are put under to feel to conform to certain images."
That's what I mean when I say De Palma isn't just revisiting his touchstones, but rethinking them. He's putting a frame around his entire filmography.
Matt:
I've noticed a mistake that I made in my review. The last line should read:
"De Palma seems to be commenting on the exploitation of women by Hollywood (where the dreams of many wannabe stars are crushed), the consumption of images of women in the media, and the pressure women are put under to feel that they must conform to certain images."
I agree with you that 'The Black Dahlia' frames De Palma's entire filmography. In fact, the film is also a catalogue of elements from virtually every one of De Palma's previous films. There are actors that have regularly appeared in his films (William Finley, Gregg Henry, Kevin Dunn, and Mike Starr) and numerous references to his other films throughout. Far from being the work for hire that the writer of The Guardian piece on De Palma suggested, this feels like a highly personal film for the director.
Well, Matt, I didn't like the movie much on first viewing. And I think you know what a De Palma fan I am. I think I had the same problem as Josh — I wish I hadn't read the book first. It's vastly superior. The problem isn't with De Palma's direction here, per se, but the script. I had read interviews where he spoke of the need to pare down the book's rich complexity and I think he pared too much or maybe not enough. From your review, I'm going to assume you read the book. Do you really think somebody who didn't could actually keep track of what's going on here?
Also, it's painfully obvious that the characters have been turned into one-dimensional figures whose deeper motivations aren't explained or illuminated (with the exception of Hartnett's Bucky). Lee Blanchard's seething anger is the most obvious example. Early on in the book, it's made clear how his sister's death has made him crazy and that's why the Dahlia obsesses him. But I kept wondering when, or if, De Palma would make that point in the movie because Blanchard's actions just come across without any rationale at all. He leaves Eckhart hanging out there overemoting for no reason an audience can decipher.
Likewise, Scarlett Johansson, although she gets better as the movie goes along, is regrettably introduced in a way that it makes her appear as though she's a teenager playing Veronica Lake dress-up. She's out of her depth here. As is Swank, who appears to be coming in from a horror movie crossed with Dunaway's Evelyn Mulwray vocal inflections (although I sort of see De Palma's connection there with the silent film angle.) Also, the depth of the love triangle is never given any real emotional impact in the film. This is where I differ from some film critics, and I guess you specifically on this: I think you read intellectually an emotional impact into moments of this movie, either from your knowledge of Ellroy's book or what you know it's trying to say. But, to me at least, it just isn't on the screen. The beginning of the movie, especially, telescopes so much plot and character complexity so quick that you just never really get to know or care about these characters. He also doesn't introduce the mindset of 40s L.A. or those political implications you mentioned. It's just too much reduction.
I have no problem with how he changed Blanchard's death from the book, and he makes the whole VERTIGO staircase scene very De Palma, and I suppose it's stupid to complain about that since that is De Palma, but his sensibility in that scene is too modern-pop for the marvelously detailed '40s world he's created. That scene just doesn't scan for me, and it's really one of his weaker set pieces.
Now, to the end (BIG SPOILER HERE, WARNING! WARNING!), I just totally disagree with De Palma's decision to have Hartnett kill Swank. He's got the right as a director to shape the material as he wishes. But what made the book have such a powerful impact, a la CHINATOWN, was the fact that the corrupt shits won. They got away with it, sort of, or were left to fester in their own horrid, rich, deadened world. I think that's a darker ending and De Palma lightens it, especially in reuniting Kay Lake and Bucky. I'm all for De Palma making a happy-ending, mainstream Hollywood blockbuster to get the cash, and hopefully he'll go make something as good as FEMME FATALE with it, but let's not ignore the facts. He softened up Ellroy's book and his harsher sense of justice. He's got the right. I don't think a film has to track a book slavishly. But, just my opinion, I don't think the screenplay choices he followed actually were BETTER THAN THE ONES IN THE BOOK. So, why change it?
Now, there's a lot of good stuff. Hartnett is wonderfully believable and transcends the screenplay's flaws of reduction. Also, I think De Palma is brilliant as the offscreen director. The way he goads and taunts Short's character is sleazily fascinating (and the porn scene once again puts the lie to his hatred of women). The satire of the Linscott family scenes worked, and Fiona Shaw is great. I also liked Kevin Dunn's small role as Short's father. From playing Murry Wilson to this, the man can do bad dads. The set design: visual poetry. And I was quite moved by the wonderful overhead shot of Short's body being discovered and then winding back to where Blanchard and Bleichert are staking out the other street. I think he visualized that scene perfectly. Ditto with the late, nightmare shot of the vulture beside Short's body on Kay's front lawn. That was where De Palma actually succeeded in putting across an added emotional depth that I think isn't there otherwise.
Here's one part of your review:
Like a self-aware dream that decodes itself as it goes along, The Black Dahlia's expressionistic imagery describes a man’s attempt to understand his own pain, and the social forces that brought it into existence. The film treats Short’s demise as a byproduct of her society’s hierarchy of oppression (rich folks on the roof, straight white men on the top floor, everyone else in the cellar); then it demonstrates that both Short’s murder and its subsequent exploitation by the media, the LAPD and Hollywood were born in the same dark places.
That's beautifully written, Matt, and I know that's in Ellroy's book. But that just is not in De Palma's movie. And in the end, that's my problem with the movie. It lacks that subtext, and that is its ultimate failure.
Somebody mentioned that this film will grow over the years. That may actually happen. It may be that my first reading of the film is too attached to the book and if I see it again later (and I always think De Palma plays better on DVD. Maybe it's something about his themes of observation and the privacy of home viewing?), I may revise my opinion upward and just see it as Brian De Palma's BLACK DAHLIA, not De Palma's reinterpretation of James Ellroy's BLACK DAHLIA. I didn't like CASUALTIES OF WAR that much the first time around, either, or THE SHINING. So, maybe you're more prescient than I am. God, I hope so, because this one was a mild disappointment for me.
A question: If Hollywood would actually let De Palma be De Palma, do you think this really would have been his choice of film to make? And are we just overlooking that in praising what he was forced to make to keep working?
Just saw it, and it struck me as more awkward than other De Palma works that everyone thinks of -- The Untouchables, for example, is graceful. Part of that may have been the music. TBD seemed overscored at the worst moments -- soaring music for burning emotions, soaring music for bitter disappointment.
Also, I have to defend White Jazz -- it is the only one of the L.A. Quartet that I enjoy rereading. Perhaps it's the superheated first person narration. The Big Nowhere's politics aren't as valuable to me as they may be to some, and L.A. Confidential seemed innovative and fresh until I read White Jazz. I cannot agree that it is anything like the weakest of the four.
Hi, TLRHB, thanks for directing me here.
I think I largely agree with Seitz--his seems to be the most perceptive article on the film I've read so far. I haven't read the book--haven't read any Ellroy, in fact, unfortunately--but the plot pretty much came together for me, though you do have to be alert for crucial clues.
I might add this is possibly De Palma's most perverse film (this in a filmmaker known for his perversity), in that he confounds not only fans of Ellroy's novel (I'm guessing, from the reactions), but also fans of his own works.
I don't see that the subtext isn't there--by the end of the picture I did get the impression that Short's murder was some kind of emblematic symptom for the city's general malaise. More, I actually liked the way Eckhart's Blanchard came together in the film--bits and pieces that didn't make sense, key information turns up, and his character come into focus a notch sharper (I do think Kay's dropping the info that his sister was killed was perectly timed--it lit bulbs both in my head and in Bucky's).
The final revelation (SPOILERS), that Blanchard knew already who had killed short--pretty much explains the Benzedrine addiction, the fact that Eckhart looked like a shell-shocked, battle-fatigued walking wounded straight out of Casualties of War. It's all too much for him to bear, and he could only self-destruct, a Me Serve whose conscience had more of a sway over his soul (that I think also helps explain the focus on Bucky--the more elliptical approach, as if catching Blanchard's story from the corner of one's eye--makes it more powerful).
Can't help comparing this to Hanson's take, which visually speaking seems timid and conventional in comparison. And the Russell Crowe character in that one seems like a flawed imitation of Blanchard's (in the sense that Black Dahlia was written before LA Confidential). The police officer who responds brutally to the brutalization of women was a forlorn knight in Hanson's; in De Palma, he's a tortured source of corruption and deceit, one among many. Somehow that makes more sense; his ultimate end makes more sense too (Hanson's was outrageously optimistic, not to mention improbable).
I must add that I think Eckhart's performance was actually pretty brave--he trusted the director to make it all clear by film's end, and I think his trust was justified.
I have no problem with the ending, even knowing (now), Ellroy's original: having Bucky shoot Madeleine isn't justice for me; it's just his way of squaring away his partner's death, and it actually binds him closer to the general atmosphere of darkness. It's a convenient wrong committed to assuage his sense of honor, then tossed atop a towering, tottering pile of wrongs already committed. As you pointed out, Short's body and the vulture feeding on it on Kay's lawn pretty much tells us that this will haunt Bucky for the rest of his life (also think it's significant that the angelic glow around Kay fades away when Bucky sees Short).
I think Blanchard and Short's relationship is central to the film, and the fact that they never actually physically meet is brilliant (is Short's film footage in the book too?); it's the relationship between a viewer and the 'goddess' he 'worships' in his own perverse way, a twisted variation on the spell movies cast over their audiences, an evocation of the power of women over men, and finally an example of the power of memory and guilt over one's conscience.
Add-on to my earlier post: I was wrong on one point. Ellroy also has Bucky and Kay getting back together, which I discovered looking again at the book today. So much for me making comments without being accurate. My bad. But I still don't think the film works...
Well, Noel, Matt — I hope you guys are right and my initial reaction is wrong. It may grow on me with time and I'll try to see it again in a theater before it hits DVD. But what you guys see as perverse or planned, I just see as poor script writing. I don't usually think much of Owen Gleiberman, but his review of DAHLIA mirrored my point: He says that Friedman's screenplay doesn't absorb Ellroy's book, it diagrams it. And it's the rough sketchiness of it that I also object to. There's a fine line (or a difference in our preferences) between filling stuff out fully for an audience and letting an audience think for itself, but in this case, it just strikes me as a failure on the part of the writer and director to take another pass at a script that wasn't quite all there..
By the way, Noel — Short's audition scenes are not in the book, and it's the most excellent addition (along with the vulture shots) by Friedman/De Palma.
Man, this is more than passing strange that I'm the one trashing De Palma here. Talk about perverse...I keep thinking this is all a De Palma-esque dream and like Rebecca Romijn, I'm going to wake up in the tub...
Talk about perverse...I keep thinking this is all a De Palma-esque dream and like Rebecca Romijn, I'm going to wake up in the tub...
Well, there you are!
No, I understand even die-in-wool De Palma fans not liking it--I still have to sit down and actually see Casualties of War again, really watch it again this time, and I still think the end of Mission to Mars is a huge misstep--and I don't definitively know that me and a handful are right and the rest of the world's wrong. I'm just going by how I feel coming out of the theater, and making it all up as I go along to explain the reaction.
Not sure if this is a dead thread, just saw it last night. I guess I'm with the majority out there, but minority here. Maybe I should just avoid film versions of books I liked a lot, I think if I wasn't familiar with it, my opinion could be totally different.
It just didn't work for me, I pretty much agree with That Little Round-Headed Boy's initial post. It pared down too much, and the tone felt wrong. All was well within DePalma's rights as a filmmaker, but everyone felt like they were in Sin City, not the universe where Elizabeth Short was so brutally murdered.
The final revelation (SPOILERS), that Blanchard knew already who had killed short--pretty much explains the Benzedrine addiction, the fact that Eckhart looked like a shell-shocked, battle-fatigued walking wounded straight out of Casualties of War. It's all too much for him to bear, and he could only self-destruct, a Me Serve whose conscience had more of a sway over his soul (that I think also helps explain the focus on Bucky--the more elliptical approach, as if catching Blanchard's story from the corner of one's eye--makes it more powerful).
Noel, this is a fascinating point that I'll have to ponder. A lot of critics have pointed to a lack of motivation for much of what happens (Blanchard's Benzedrine habit, for instance) but you're right that it does all make sense in retrospect. It also brings a whole new level of unity to the party, doesn't it, when you focus on this?
Their whole investigation, Fire and Ice, it's a foregone conclusion. So what's Blanchard investigating? Why is he willing to let Junior Nash get away? It's almost like he's acting out his role in a movie, eh?
Oh, and did anyone else keep thinking of Laura Palmer during Short's screen tests?
"It pared down too much, and the tone felt wrong."
I need to read the damned book.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's better or at least livelier, but I'm thinking of Kubrick's Barry Lyndon--Kubrick was accused of draining the blood out of Thackeray's novel, but people have popped up making a case for the corpse's greatness anyway (I wouldn't know; have to read Thackeray's novel and see the film again).
"it does all make sense in retrospect"
Yep, at that precise moment(when I learn that he knew everything) Blanchard's character snapped into focus. It was an extraordinary experience for me.
I would guess Blanchard was investigating until the point of Nash's death (he'd just come from beating Linscotte up, right?), when he'd found out the truth (I think). After that, he was mostly mourning. Yes, I agree, I think he was acting out a role.
"Laura Palmer's diary"
Never occured to me, but come to think of it...
TLR-HB: There is so much to respond to in your comments that I won't even try to cover everything. I'll just concentrate on a couple of hopefully related aspects, and try to weave in some other points raised in this thread.
Regarding my familiarity with the book, I first read it about 12 years ago. I reread the first quarter again before seeing the movie, but have yet to revisit and finish the book a second time.
So I had more of an advantage going into the movie than someone who had never read it, but less of an advantage than a really hardcore Ellroy fan who can recite the novel chapter and verse. As to whether that helped me follow the admittedly jumbled plot -- De Palma's so abstract with his narrative that he's practically gone Cubist -- I couldn't say.
Now for the blasphemous part: I know I am in the minority here, but at the risk of isolating myself still further, I'll say that I didn't just love this movie on its own terms, I also found it to be the most faithful film translation of any Ellroy novel ever adapted to the screen, in that watching it felt true to the visceral/emotional experience of reading Ellroy.
As in Ellroy's fiction, De Palma's DAHLIA characters are archetypes, but they have tangled psychological motivations; or maybe you could say that they're real guys who on some level envision themselves as being larger than life and embrace their own caricature -- that X-rated Raymond Chandler vibe that Ellroy has been polishing for about 20 years now, an approach that became consciously abstract around the time of WHITE JAZZ, still his greatest achievement in my opinion.
While LA CONFIDENTIAL was certainly a more faithful transcription of a book's events and situations, for me it lacked the propulsive, excessive, crazy quality of Ellroy's fiction, coupled with the weirdly abstract quality of the language, the characterizations, etc. Ellroy is a postmodern crime author who's not primarily interested in what happened and what it meant, but in the cultural and biological forces that impel men and women to behave like animals.
Plus, there are many times reading Ellroy when you just don't know what the hell is going on, and you have to go back and reread certain chapters, or even the whole book, to really put the pieces together. The pieces do come together, but not without considerable effort, and even when they do come together, they're ultimately less important than the world the author has created, the characters with which he's populated it, and the sense of life that the work communicates. I really think De Palma gets the author, his characters and his sense of life, much more so than Curtis Hanson, whose movie was more spare, clean and straightforward than DAHLIA, but does not have a tenth of DAHLIA's visual sophistication and trancelike fixation on the mechanics of thoughts and feelings. If De Palma had directed L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, he would have made Bud White even more brutish and frightening, and resisted any attempts to explain or soften him as Hanson did. (I feel strange beating up on L.A. CONFIDENTIAL because I do think it's a fine adaptation and a good movie, albeit one that kind of craps out at the end so as not to send us home feeling suicidal. But while it may be a more perfect movie than DAHLIA, it's not as aesthetically complex or ambitious; if DAHLIA is a failure, which I certainly don't think it is, then I would still describe it as a movie whose failures are more interesting than Hanson's successes.
I really think De Palma was the right man for this job, because while he's very different from Ellroy in a lot of ways, they are both misunderstood popular artists who make a point of trying to refine, alter or in this case revise their art -- to challenge themselves to try somethng new, even if it means turning off the audience. Ellroy is an extremely self-aware provocateur who pays equal attention to the frame and the painting around it, and that heightened awareness of the author's presence is deliberate. DAHLIA captured that aspect of Ellroy perfectly, the thing that really sets him apart from, say, Elmore Leonard or Raymond Chandler or other giants of crime fiction -- the essence of Ellroy. It's not surprising that De Palma is the only director to find a filmmaking equivalent of Ellroy's prose -- that strange mix of volcanic temper and scientific detachment, the quality of being simultaneously in the moment and floating above it in retrospect and trying to understand the forces that made particular things happen. I think De Palma gets Ellroy on a gut level and understands who he is as an artist and a cult figure; Ellroy himself is often described as a sensation monger, more showman than artist, and often more interested in the sound of his own voice than in simply telling a story and delineating characters. Not to mention racist, sexist, homophobic, neandrathal, etc. In other words, detractors think of him as a pretentious primitive -- all terms or labels that are often applied to De Palma as well.
All of which explains why I refuse to see this is a work for hire; to me it seems more like a tribute from one kindred spirit to another.
And now a direct quote, TLRH-B, from a section that jumped out at me because it goes right to the heart of my own approach to writing about movies;
"This is where I differ from some film critics, and I guess you specifically on this: I think you read intellectually an emotional impact into moments of this movie, either from your knowledge of Ellroy's book or what you know it's trying to say. But, to me at least, it just isn't on the screen."
As I am fond of saying, your mileage may vary. The fact that two people can look at the same movie, and have one of them be moved and impressed and the other detached and disappointed, is a mystery that defies even the most meticulous attempt to explain how movies work on people. Speaking only for myself, I thought it WAS all on the screen -- the emotions (sadness, guilt, depression, rage), the sense of Short's murder being, as Noel said, inextricably tied into the malaise of postwar Los Angeles, and postwar America in general.
I also thought the Bucky/Lee/Kay triangle was economically but elegantly conveyed, with a Howard Hawks quality of stoic passion (cool on the outside, burning up inside). The New Years' eve moment where Kay kisses Bucky -- ending with those segmented closeups of Lee, first seeming jocular and unthreatened, then betraying his fear and hurt -- was extraordinarily moving, and true to the emotions of anyone who's been in a relationship like that. I was equally moved by Bucky and Kay's dinner table scene -- the verbal dance around their feelings, with Isham's score shifting from major to minor keys depending on whether the conversation seems to be going well or poorly for Bucky. And whenever I think of that closeup of Kay's lap at the movies -- using her two hands to hold Bucky's and Lee's hands -- I smile. It's not just a replication of something from the adapted, it's an example of the adapter adding something of his own, a purity of feeling that Ellroy at his most emotional can never equal. It's a delicate, vulnerable moment, directed in that same spirit. The closeup of the trio's hands is a poetic representation of their circumstances. The moment is powerful not simply because of what the director shows us, but because of how he chooses to show it.
What I'm trying, with what seems like limited success, to get at here, is my belief that when you are moved by a film, it's never just a result of technique, and it's never just a result of bringing your own emotions into the theater. I think the first activates the second. The camerawork, the editing, the score, viscerally and perhaps even scientifically unearth emotions in particular viewers. Not in every viewer, certainly -- or in most viewers, alas -- but in some viewers.
In this particular film what got me was the sense of anesthetized passion -- a quality that I also associate with Chet Baker's music, as if he's struggling to remember what it was like to feel things intensely. De Palma subsumes Bucky's feelings in layers of analysis, speculation and imaginative leaps; for the first time in a De Palma movie, those God's-eye crane shots aren't simply departures from first person POV, they're an expression of it. To me, DAHLIA occupies the same position in De Palma's filmography that WHITE JAZZ does in Ellroy's; it's a signpost work that seems to compress and summarize the artist's entire career while also pointing the way forward, toward more and hopefully even greater leaps.
That a director in his 60s who's been making movies for four decades would take such an imaginative leap is cause for celebration.
Then again, if it doesn't do it for you, it doesn't do it for you, and there's probably nothing I can say that will change that.
I might actually have been lucky not reading the book coming in, and while I was confused at many points, I did feel it was coming together as it went along, and at the right dramatic moment.
Didn't feel that way about L.A. Confidential, by the way--there Hanson made clear where you stood every step of the way; he never threw things at you and left you puzzled (that sudden exchange between Lee and a stranger just out of Bucky's earshot; that extra figure at the staircase scene; the confused moment when the shootout prior to Short's body being found (Who fired the first shot? Why?)).
In the case of the shootout, of course, it turns out the question is a key plot point. Hanson would never risk doing it that way; De Palma does, several times in the picture.
For the majority of THE BLACK DAHLIA’S running time I could be put in the vaguely dissatisfied camp: yes, the discovery of Short’s corpse was brilliant, the POV introduction of Harnett to Swank’s clan as wittily and quintessentially De Palmaesque as Matt claimed, but other scenes felt laggard and perfunctory, and nothing much really seemed to matter. At times I even found myself wondering why De Palma had wanted to make the movie in the first place. But the final scene, which forces us to take a long, clear look at the raw nightmare usually confined to noir’s tantalizing shadows, clarified all that proceeded and cemented this as one of my favorites of the year. (Such unpacking of the horrors deliberately frozen out by noir’s cold macho veneer is one of Ellroy’s key goals as well, of course, so I agree with Matt that for all the liberties taken with the novel this is the most faithful adaptation of the author we’re likely to see.)
For me it wasn’t just Eckhart’s character arc that made sense in retrospect, but the whole film. I’d noticed and admired the subtlety of Bucky’s ever-more quavering hands and nervous swallows, but almost dismissively accepted them as self-conscious tics, the way an actor of Harnett’s generation would naturally distance themselves from the iconic but ultimately unrealistic tough guys of movies past. But they cut deeper and more meaningfully than that. Bucky is being rope-a-doped—by his job, his lust for Swank and devotion to Short, by the shaming example of his partner’s imagined zeal—and he doesn’t even notice it as the blows are turning his insides to paste. There are two crows perched on the ledge of the building where Blanchard stages his sham shootout; you can see them as De Palma’s camera glides along to the scenes true destination. Blanchard tries to shoo his away at the crime scene; Bucky doesn’t even know one’s been stalking him till the end.
Matt: ““Do you think you’re capable of playing sadness?” an unseen director asks a wannabe actress and future murder victim….”
Moreover, when the line is asked we’re actually looking at Hartnett, fighting the tears that deserve to flow for the poor girl. No less than FEMME FATALE, THE BLACK DAHLIA rebirths an outmoded noir staple—here the silent, square-jawed avenger—by critiquing the amoral foundation upon which it’s built. Hard-boiled justice won’t suffice; Bucky must feel for the victim, even though this is what will ultimately crush him. She’s owed no less.
“[Kay] appears in her doorway [in the final scene] bathed in angelic light – the brightest thing in a very dark film.”
Viewed first through an odd horizontal window in the door that frames her ruby lips. The film’s last image of a mouth. Even before Elizabeth’s shocking appearance the heavenly promise Kay offers is haunted by bloody joker smiles.
Aaron Aradillas: “The performance by Josh Hartnett is pretty astonishing in its empathy. It's ranks with Travolta's work in Blow Out. It's what Craig Wasson was attempting in Body Double.”
Agreed on all counts.
“The more he grows a conscience the more he's out of his depth. It's what makes the final scene so devastating. He realizes how much he's lost and how much he's going to continue to lose.”
And finely put.
Then again, if it doesn't do it for you, it doesn't do it for you, and there's probably nothing I can say that will change that.
It doesn't do it for me, and I don't think my mind will change, but I must say Matt, your analysis and defense of the film in the post and moreso in the comments here do make me appreciate the work DePalma did. I might not be sold on the film The Black Dahlia, but I am sold on DePalma's effort (and if that sounds coy, it is absolutely not intended as such).
I wouldn't be surprised if it's better or at least livelier, but I'm thinking of Kubrick's Barry Lyndon--Kubrick was accused of draining the blood out of Thackeray's novel, but people have popped up making a case for the corpse's greatness anyway (I wouldn't know; have to read Thackeray's novel and see the film again).
I don't think it's a question of livelier, if anything DePalma's film is livelier. Matt mentions this as being an ideal Ellroy adaption, and I think he may be right. But, The Black Dahlia is not the ideal Ellroy book. If the approach here was given to White Jazz, which has been mentioned as the crystalization point for Ellroy's textual approach, I think I would have been sold.
But the Dahlia is posed at the midpoint between early the not-fully-formed first Dudley appearance in Clandestine and White Jazz. It's Ellroy, but a bit apart from Ellroy. And I think the reality of that particular murder gave the book a bag of cement that prevents it from taking off like White Jazz does.
Then again, like Scottie Ferguson, I'm dealing in memory here. My copy of the book was swiped, now I have to buy it again to see if my memory matches up to reality. With that caveat...
To me, it's all about the accumulation of heightened details. The timeline is streteched over years. Madeleine Linscott in the film is a Sin City femme fatale. I find it better when the monstrosity grows, rather than walking into the nightclub fully formed.
Same with the Fiona Shaw character. I think her dinner table rant was when the film lost me. And, I didn't realize it at the time, but everything thats been said here about it mirroring Ellroy's machine-gun language is true. But the monstrosity also takes on a certoonish form that just seemed inappropriate to me.
Likewise, DePalma, in a not surprising move, brings Short to life in the audience and Buckey's mind primarily through the film audition. Even if that was the main method to identify with her, there was a lot of other details brought forth in typical detective fiction investigation. As an adaption goes, it makes sense to cut it and let the actress you're already paying a fee to do the work. But what was lost is that growth in the mind. It kind of seemed like a jump when Buckey became obssessed in the film. I should have become obsessed as well.
I don't want to seem like I'm dwelling on the book though. And I do want to stress that changes don't bother me, they just seem like the wrong changes. They would have been right in White Jazz or even the Big Nowhere - Buzz seems more primed to get condensed to a ball of archetypes than Buckey or Lee does.
As a close, does anyone else think that the outright insanity Ellroy has grown to in The Cold Six Thousand might actually make a good match with the outright insanity Tony Scott has grown to in his recent films? It would either give me a seizure or be really interesting. Maybe both. Cheers!
In this particular film what got me was the sense of anesthetized passion -- a quality that I also associate with Chet Baker's music, as if he's struggling to remember what it was like to feel things intensely.
That's a beautiful description. Something rang false to me about the scenes in which Bucky breaks down and cries, but interpreted this way they make sense: he recognizes the enormity, the tragedy of this situation he's in, so he's trying to react appropriately by breaking down and crying. But he's so desensitized: by his own compromises, by the extent to which his world is revealed to have been a shadow world of his own construction, by violence. The tears are artificial, they are false...
Some will say that these tears didn't strike them as false at all. Some will say that the scene reflects Josh Hartnett's limitations as an actor. But neither of those explanations seems adequate to me.
I don't remember recent film that I've had so much trouble evaluating and interpreting (though Art School Confidential did give me a spot of trouble earlier this year). This conversation is quite welcome!
Matt: Thanks for the response. Like I said, I get De Palma, I thought he was the right guy for this, too. And I'm usually the first one seeing all his cues and connections. And I never cared for LA CONFIDENTIAL, either. My problem might be an over-familiarity with the Dahlia novel. But, as you know, I'm far from alone on this, and it's not just people who don't "get" De Palma. I guess it comes down to this: What you call economical, I call undercooked. I'm usually the first to accept the undercooked parts of De Palma's films for the whole. But you're right, we can only see what each of us sees when we come to a picture.
Bruce, this is a very, very interesting way of looking at Bucky's demeanor, as well as your comment on the lips framed in the doorway of the final scene:
"Bucky is being rope-a-doped—by his job, his lust for Swank and devotion to Short, by the shaming example of his partner’s imagined zeal—and he doesn’t even notice it as the blows are turning his insides to paste. There are two crows perched on the ledge of the building where Blanchard stages his sham shootout; you can see them as De Palma’s camera glides along to the scenes true destination. Blanchard tries to shoo his away at the crime scene; Bucky doesn’t even know one’s been stalking him till the end."
I think it all comes down to how each of us "looks" at a film. Maybe I'm just too literal for my own good. You guys are more willing to forgive the script's economy/undercooking than I am, and are willing to look at De Palma's visual metaphors as enough. I think a more successful film would have been able to incorporate both, as I believe he has done in other films. But the sketched-in quality of the plot and some of the changes just don't work for me. I don't buy the "art film" excuse for the film's shortcomings. As somebody wrote somewhere in all this De Palma talk, just think what the guy could do if he had a great script!
But this has definitely been a great discussion, and I'm going to make time to see the film again, and see if some of these points help me look at it in a different light. Can't ask for more from film criticism than that.
I'm a little late, I know. Matt & Keith, you are both fine writers with much more practice in analyzing films but I just don't get it. I'm generally not a De Palma fan, to be honest, but am usually eager to see his movies because he's such an inventive filmmaker. I grew up with my dad berating him for stealing and all that nonsense of a Hitchcock devotee so it took some time for me to see his true skills. That said, this picture just seems a mess to me. My eyes started glazing over reading these long comments (which I'm sure are valid and would help me understand your POV) but you essay was so well written I wanted to agree with you until I stopped reading and thought about my reaction to the film again.
What I see is a shitload of pain wrapped up in an ugly, stained butcher's sheet tied crudely together with a satin bow instead of the customary twine.
There were scenes I really enjoyed (the POV entering Linscott Manor is the clear standout) yet the plot--the third act in particular--is so ludicrous I was spinning from bewilderment nearly the entire running time. I think most of it stems from the writing, though, not De Palma's work. His signatures are the best things in the picture: the elaborate linking crane shot, the GREETINGS quotes, that dinner scene. Yet I cannot feel safe criticizing the source material since I have not read Ellory's book. I tried LA CONFIDENTIAL after that film came out but couldn't find an in with his prose. And I guess that's what it comes down to: for all the complex theory on display (most obvious the deification & degradation of women), if there's no good story behind it, I can't get down. I may try to write my own review this week for my blog once I get internet set up at home but I'm always happy to join the conversation here.
Matt: Referring to your comment that De Palma's film of 'The Black Dahlia' is "...a signpost work that seems to compress and summarize the artist's entire career while also pointing the way forward, toward more and hopefully even greater leaps." I think you're spot-on. There are characters, actors, images, techniques, props, costumes and themes from previous De Palma films that are all brought together here, which reinforces your point.
I've seen 'The Black Dahlia' twice now and it was even better the second time. And I'd like to echo what That Little Round-Headed Boy said: this has been a great discussion.
What the hell, while we're having this conversation...what's everybody's feelings on De Palma graphically showing the Dahlia's mouth getting sliced open at the end? I had to turn away, and I was left with the overall feeling that it was unnecessary to convey the horror. Don't worry, I don't think it's a sign of misogyny. And it's probably tame compared to many of the current horror films I refuse to watch. But, again, does that tell me anything, does it add anything to my understanding of the pain she went through? I had the same reaction to Angie's face getting slashed up in closeup in DRESSED TO KILL, for what it's worth. Does this tell me anything about De Palma, or does it just tell me that he wants us to see how horrible a murder really is? Or is it that I'm just squeamish? I've got no dog in this hunt, just curious what everybody's thoughts are on it.
I've got no problem with the actual slashing. Seems to me to be the only way he can go with Shaw's mounting hysteria--to produe images equally hysterical.
I have bigger problems with the mutilations in films like Saw and Hostel; there, the slicing is all, and often lovingly dwelt upon; here it's a more glancing blow (a quick shot, really), and the real horror os the expression of horrified delight on Shaw's face.
TLR-HB: Of the two examples you describe, the one in Dressed to Kill bothers me more, and has always bothered me. That movie is so generally playful that the occasionally graphic bloodletting seems unnecessary. De Palma is so good at making you think you saw more than you actually saw that when he does something like this, I lose a bit of faith in him.
I feel the same way about the end of the staircase shootout in The Untouchables, when George Stone unleashes his final bullseye and zaps the guy holding the bookkeeper hostage; the point has been made, but seconds later, De Palma reprises that shot to show us the assassin sliding down the wall, leaving what looks like Ragu in his wake. Not too far removed from the mentality that Noel (above) cites in certain slasher pictures.
This is very different from the baseball bat killing in that same film, which is done mostly off camera via sound effects, saving the gore for the end, when we rise to a God's eye view and see the velvety blood spilling over the table -- the whole point of that scene is to shock and horrify the audience, to wipe the smile off their faces. In comparison, the train station moment seems misjudged; the entire elaborate sequence leading up to it is musical and mathematical, a series of kinetic pleasures, like dance; it's basically derring-do, and the intrusion of gore seems to cheapen the magic.
As for Black Dahlia, the whole movie is so grim and despairing in so many ways that I agree with Noel that it was necessary to raise the stakes a bit, and show us that even though we've settled into this nightmarish world, there are levels of evil we haven't seen yet, and it is still possible to be appalled.
Although of course one could argue that the face slashing in Dressed to Kill is similar to Capone's baseball bat killing in The Untouchables -- an injection of horror into what has been a somewhat playful, sensual, naughty section of the film. These things are subjective, but I felt that particular shot was not needed, because the killing was already so intense and surprising.
Everything is subjective as Matt and TLRHB points out, but I've never felt De Palma ever overstepped his bounds--maybe because I've never seen him as more than a middling goremeister, as compared to, say, George Romero or David Cronenberg (The Fury climaxed with an exploding head; Scanners BEGAN with one).
But even with Romero or Cronenberg you always felt there was a philosophy behind all that body horror, that it was meant to shock you into a different level of awareness, political or philosophical. The only level of meaning I've ever discerned behind the amateurish horrors of Saw and Hostel was "Gee, look what we can do!"
Speaking of being "out of one's depth," I was reluctant to post here, but having absorbed much of the De Palma-related assessment among various bloggers -- most of whom are new to me -- leading up to the release of "The Black Dahlia," and now having seen the film, I'll add my two cents. I probably should've posted over at Dennis Cozallio's blog, where I added a couple of De Palma-related comments many days ago, but I trust he'll return here after seeing the film, and can respond to my comments here if he wishes. (Thanks, Dennis, for welcoming to your conversation, and for the many links that led me here, to the Little Round-Headed Boy, and to others; this has, as I've said before, been a real feast for me, a delight).
The movie is only hours old for me at this point, but I'm over the moon about it. Over. The. Moon! It is, quite simply, the most dazzling film I've seen this year. This is De Palma's "Vertigo" -- funny saying that about a guy who made "Obsession"! -- and I don't think I'll regret calling it a masterpiece. It is that.
So why don't the De Palma partisans -- the people I've come to know and love in the past few weeks, the relatively few devotees of this man's work who see what I see in so many of his films -- speak about it in such lukewarm tones? If you guys aren't going to go to bat for it, who will?
You mean you're gonna leave it to ME to defend this film? Good heavens.
Where to begin. Maybe you all are set the bar higher for a De Palma film, or maybe you just don't see as many "mainstream," or even "art," films as I do. I've seen some good films this year, but honestly, nothing touches "The Black Dahlia." Not only is this a good film, not only is it a good De Palma film, but it's a KEY De Palma film, a deeply painful film at times. A "work for hire"? I know that he wasn't the first filmmaker to oversee this production, but is there any scene in here that doesn't bear his stamp? Frankly, I find it amazing how MUCH of a De Palma film it is -- thematically and visually.
I haven't had an experience at the theater that approaches today's viewing of "The Black Dahlia" since -- and I'm not kidding here -- seeing Andrei Tarkovsky's "Stalker" on the big screen (overwhelming for very different reasons), or Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia," or, before that, the sheer giddiness of sitting through "Raising Cain" in the early 1990s.
To come to the Internet in hopes of finding similar responses, only to discover that most people are in another camp, is somewhat discouraging, but I'll press on. I haven't read the Slant review, and Dennis C. has yet to post his thought.
Little Round-Headed Boy: Your assessment of "Mission to Mars" got me to sit down with the DVD and give that film, which I could barely stomach a couple of years ago, a second look. Your comments helped me connect with that film and see things that I was blinded to the first time through. I do hope your future viewings of "The Black Dahlia" are more rewarding, but if not, thanks for the encouragement on "Mission to Mars." Maybe one day I'll catch it on the big screen, where I now wish I'd seen it the first time around.
Sorry for the ramble. I know I'm throwing out assertions and emotional reactions without making much effort to justify them, but when I have the sort of rapturous response to a film that I had this afternoon seeing "The Black Dahlia," I'm in no mood to try to explain myself. I simply need to share my excitement, and hope that it might be contagious for someone else to go see this film, or see it a second time.
Or a fourth time, as I did today (though, sad to say, in subpar projection). Still a great film, though. Christian, I'm the Slant reviewer and I'm also going to write about the film at more length for another publication. You are correct in calling this a KEY De Palma film. It is that... and I share in your enthusiasm for it.
I hope, when I write about it again, to do it further justice.
I'm glad to see so many people coming out of the woodwork for this movie. I saw it last night and loved it.
I always thought DePalma liked women, but this movie really hammered home for me how much he likes MEN. Actors are almost never directed this sensitively.
You know what the Elizabeth Short screen tests reminded me of? Hartnett's other performances. That blank-eyed puppy-dog head-ducking stuff. I will never be able to watch "40 Days and 40 Nights" again, not that it was easy the first time. Hartnett (who is genius in this movie) even allows himself to revert back to his old tics in 2 or 3 key scenes when his character zones out under pressure. Painful stuff.
But MJS, given how you feel about "Dahlia" I am stunned at your lack of love for Brooks' "Looking For Comedy," which takes roughly the same tack toward comedy that "Dahlia" does to stock sex and violence ... Brooks' character is supposed to be hateful, but pathetic too. He's a combination of Bucky and the screen-test director from "Dahlia."
John S
"I'm the Slant reviewer and I'm also going to write about the film at more length for another publication."
You look lonely on top of the metacrtics page, with your 100 score. My only complaint about your piece was that it was too short; glad to hear you'll add to it.
Keith, can you tell us where your longer review will appear? I, too, am eager to read it, and agree that your excellent Slant review was too short.
Enough with the ambivalence! This sucker is a masterpiece, point court. I don't care if it "makes sense" or is technically faithful to Ellroy (though it is sho nuf spiritually faithful to the Ellroy "thing") yet I'm at a loss for all these niggles -- I love how vacant and banal Scarlet Jo... is -- it's not romeo and juliet or moulin rouge, fer chrissake, it's commedia del arte meets Giallo. It's probably the greatest giallo ever made.
Furthermore, there are very few movies that can be honestly and accurately called Sternbergian -- this is the most Sternbergian movie since The Shanghai Gesture.
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