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The Black Dahlia September 18, 2006 |
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Poor Scarlett Johansson, I can’t help but feel pity for the young Hollywood starlet (as much as one non-millionaire can feel pity for one multi-millionaire), she has seen so much success in her brief career that when an ill advised role comes along in a poorly made throwback to an old school genre it seems like a monumental disappointment, when really it’s just a misstep on an otherwise strong resume. On paper, the role of Kay Lake in an adaptation of James Ellroy’s classic murder yarn “The Black Dahlia” seems fitting for the bodacious Johansson, who with each acclaimed role gets closer and closer to achieving the kind of balance between pure talent and knockout looks that graced the likes of Hollywood royalty Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly, after all she has Film Noir Femme Fatale written all over her raspy voice and pouty crimson colored lips, but upon execution the match is all wrong. I don’t know if it’s because Johansson has suddenly lost a bit of that natural talent we’ve seen in stuff like “Ghost World”, “Lost in Translation” and “Match Point”, whether she received unusually weak direction from the sometimes talented Brian De Palma, or if the whole thing is just a bundle of inaccuracy, but when you’ve got a movie about the obsessive workings of two detectives trying to solve a notorious murder case that ultimately gets shackled amidst some kind of poorly conceived love triangle, with Johansson’s oddly sexless Kay Lake in the middle, and all you can think about is how unconvincing (performances especially) the entire production is – a bad homage to a genre that really didn’t need the props – than you’ve got a major problem. Scarlett will get over it, I’m sure, as will the adaptability of James Ellroy, which still has Curtis Hanson’s brilliant “L.A. Confidential” to it’s credit (as if Ellroy needed Hollywood to convince us of his mastery anyway), but for the immediate present, this unholy blend of hardboiled detectives, murder mysteries, Femme Fatales (there are more than one, but that isn’t a good thing either), standard, clichéd Noir soundtrack musings, rife with a lonely trumpet solo that more than grates on your most sensitive hearing nerve, and good actors giving some of the worst performances of their lives, is entirely forgettable hokum, stuck in the past with too much respect for the old guard, and not enough sense to advance on it with any kind of innovations, or even the slightest hint of originality. Homage is all well and good, but when your homage becomes laughable parody, and even your talented cast comes out ridiculous, it appears some critical components went missing, lost in translation, as it were. Let’s start with Miss Scarlett Jo, since we seemed to have strayed focus near the end of the first paragraph, for she so badly sticks out like a sore thumb trying to emulate, rather stiffly, a ‘40’s screen siren with just enough sympathy, sexual intrigue, and innocence to be the most fully realized, if not completely clueless, character of the film’s central ménage. She plays an orphaned Midwest girl of 25 who shacks up with the L.A. detective (Aaron Eckhart) who saved her from a sexual maniac years ago, but now finds nothing but boredom with her dedicated, possibly corrupt hero, that is until the man brings home a new partner (Josh Hartnett) and the three quickly become a trio of tightly knit convoluted pees in a pod, going out to nightclubs together, joking together, staging elaborate three-person dinner parties together, and apparently sending off non threatening sexual vibes to each other (mostly female to male) that hardly goes beyond glances and a few weak willed lines of suggestion. “Always she’d be there,” says Hartnett about Johansson and their chummy threesome, in typically boring voice over narration, “never between us, but always in the middle.” The setup makes things all the more confusing when two other women enter the equation, Madeleine Linscott (Hilary Swank, in a laughable Swedish accent), a construction heiress who has a thing for fine art, lesbian nightclubs, and overwrought detectives (cue Hartnett for a few un-erotic sex scenes), and more importantly, Elizabeth Short (Mia Kirshner, late of “24”), the would be actress who was found brutally slain, dismembered and disemboweled in a vacant Hollywood field, a case that comes to totally consume the two detectives with it’s seemingly endless fetishistic possibilities. That Madeleine is a dead ringer for Short, named the Black Dahlia by the press for her resemblance to a character in “The Blue Dahlia”, suggests a sexually obsessive drive in the detectives, especially Hartnett’s (“she looks like that dead girl, how sick are you”, screams Johansson to Hartnett in one of the film’s unintentionally funniest lines), but any psychological symbolism is lost as the film constantly runs off course, painstakingly trying to fill in plot holes while forgetting which route it wants to take; murder thriller, character study, love triangle, or worse, a Frankensteinian blend of all three that never quite jells amongst De Palma’s overblown Noirisms. In Ellroy’s punchy prose it all weaves together to paint a fascinating portrait of 1940’s Hollywood as a row of seedy D studios, dashed dreams, pornography rings, and unseemly power players that constantly get away with murder because the L.A. police force is too fragile to prosecute them (a major theme throughout Ellroy’s L.A. quartet, for which ‘Dahlia’ was the first), but in De Palma’s imagination all that rot and greed, murder, sex, and double crosses is nothing more than a platform for which he can salute the noir masters of yesteryear (like he already did, much better, with “The Untouchables”), and plunk down two uninspired love stories to go along with the detective plot. His production team, including old mainstays Dante Ferretti on design and Vilmos Zsigmond behind the camera, gets points for trying, and a few of De Palma’s trademark flowing long takes are especially impressive thanks to Zsigmond’s skillful Steadicam work, but there’s more to making a noir film work than getting the studio sets to look like they did on “The Big Sleep”, “Kiss Me Deadly”, or any countless private eye melodrama of the late ‘40’s and ‘50’s, there’s the underlying sense of dread (originally an offshoot of the Cold War) to be had, and in order for that to work convincingly you need actors that sound natural while delivering their hyper fictionalized noir speak, and unfortunately for “The Black Dahlia” this group of usually talented players, especially the strikingly beautiful Johansson, in easily her worst role to date, are hopelessly unemotional, and finally, completely uninteresting. My suggestion is to rent “Out of the Past”, “The Untouchables”, and “L.A. Confidential” for three much better versions of noir as vintage, homage, and postmodern homage, track down Ellroy’s brilliant L.A. quartet, or his stunning autobiography “My Dark Places”, in which he obsesses over the death of his mother in contrast to that of Elizabeth Short, and finally forget about this unfortunate exercise in historical reproduction gone terribly wrong. by Adam Suraf “The Black Dahlia” is playing at the McKinley Mall Cinema. |