FilmEdge.net | THE BLACK DAHLIA film review

Publishes the Daily Edge website to promote the Universal Pictures release by Brian De Palma The Black Dahlia opening in theaters September 15, 2006.

Review by Scott Weitz

A thin, glittering veneer of glamour obscures the darker sins of Los Angeles, where movies and myths are made to order in a town built on contrivance and fantasy. This is the subtext of many a James Ellroy novel, and his best-selling The Black Dahlia began his LA quartet exploring this vintage (and perpetuated) theme for an audience which devoured the movieland mystery and its subsequent installments.

Brian De Palma's film adaptation of THE BLACK DAHLIA film adaptation, written by Josh Friedman, exploits the blood fiction of the tale, but disappointingly fails to ground itself enough in human tragedy to give De Palma's lavish style the much needed realism and heart it lacks.

For much of the film, the Dahlia killing plays like a period soundtrack of the infamous 1947 slaying, instead of standing center stage as advertising leads one to expect. This de-emphasis of Elizabeth Short's life and gruesome death, in favor of playing out the melodrama built around the event, bisects the film's emotional resonance as severely as its victim.

THE BLACK DAHLIA opens traveling two directions at once: introducing LAPD officers Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert and Leland "Lee" Blanchard as pugilists-turned-peace-officers on an interdepartmental fight card, promoting the good of the force while beating the crap out of each other. Several rounds of alpha male bloodletting ensue in the ring before these literally sparring partners end up working together on the streets.

While Josh Hartnett is definitely maturing as an actor, he still looks like the star's younger brother who stepped into the part of Bleichert. His youthful appearance and appeal belie his hard-hitting tough cop role, though its unlikely any modern actor can effectively assume the mantle of Bogart whose patent is still pending on such iconic '40s performances.

Bleichert is written as the equal — if not the brainier better — of Blanchard in and out of the ring, but Hartnett's lack of years always give Aaron Eckhart (as Blanchard) the on-screen edge. Indeed, Eckhart plays Blanchard with more edge than a straight razor right from his first frames; alas, starting at such a pique his character has nowhere to go but off the charts of dramatic believability when the actual plot kicks into gear and his own neuroses are revealed.

As Kay Lake, Blanchard's girl who harbors her own dark past, Scarlett Johansson imbues the 1947 model of glamour siren befitting De Palma's overly stylized period piece. The arch manner in which Kay holds her cigarette holder aloft distracts from the acting after the fifth pose-aimed at the camera. Though Johansson injects the 'supercop' Bleichert-Blanchard triangle with feminine simpatico, this function is repeatedly diluted by the emphasis on attitude over acting.

These intrusive reminders that we're watching a period film, however, may serve some dramatic purpose if we're generous. With Ellroy's pet project of exposing LA's ugly corruption lying underneath the makeup and glamour lighting, such numerous noir moments and cliches could be De Palma's cinematic representation of Ellroy's exposé agenda.

It's hard to tell if the director is clumsily reminding us we're watching 1947 through 2006 eyes, or if he intends his characters to actually be putting on such charades and poses for each other — as if these Angelinos insist on living their own glamorous lies for each other, if not themselves.

My fear is the latter theory gives the film and filmmakers too much credit for cleverness in the subtextual department. If so, the proof of this overindulgence of film noir attitude rests in the mannered performance of Hilary Swank as LA socialite Madeleine Linscott.

The Black Dahlia is less a mystery about the infamous murdered starlet of the title, and more a dark indictment of the fictional characters surrounding and investigating her brutal death. Viewers navigate through stratified levels of De Palma's cinematic style and Ellroy's neurotic LA narrative, but ultimately these two creative mindsets fail to mesh into a truly satisfying tale. The film offers fans of either artist much of what they expect, but in the end not enough of what they want to make a truly spectacular, nerve-jangling noir crime drama. Individual moments satisfy more than De Palmian set pieces as blood and brutality trickle down the streets of Los Angeles. But much like the city's river, this film never really builds a constant flow of satisfying entertainment.

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Again, one hopes it is the director trying too hard instead of the actor, but in any case the damaging result to her character's believability derails the intended parallel plot between Madeleine and Bleichert with the murdered look-alike Black Dahlia.

Not to lay the film's shortcomings at Swank's feet by any means, but her story line and involvement with Bleichert are the structural weakness which keeps the film from gaining dramatic momentum. A tale inspired by the most infamous murder in LA history (for the next 50 years, anyway) shouldn't and doesn't need two or three other ancillary and fictional mysteries woven around it. Given how the original Dahlia murder case fascinated newspaper readers six decades ago and, based on sales for Ellroy's novel, continues to hold its grip on minds still, why fabricate such convoluted crimes around it only to muddy the scene?

Any pathos intended to be derived from Short's shocking and horrible murder amid the Land of Dreams is also severed before it can blossom, due to the distracting melodramas between Blanchard and Kay, Bleichert and Madeleine, and pasts which rise to haunt them all. None of these specters of corruption hold up to the real-life dismemberment of a young girl's body and dreams in a town and industry which devour naive hopefuls who arrive in Hollywood by the busload, then and today.

Yes, the Dream Factory can build as well as destroy, perhaps only accomplishing one with the other. Yes, the pancake rouge and tinsel mask the scars on Hollywood's faces and souls. And in the period Ellroy lovingly-if-obsessively pays pained homage to, justice in Los Angeles took a back seat to political image building at times, and at the cost of innocent lives. All high-ranking cards in the author's well-played hands, made so vividly evident in Curtis Hanson's 1997 skillfully slick adaptation of L.A. CONFIDENTIAL.

If anything, the central disappointment of THE BLACK DAHLIA is that such a shining example exists of successfully adapting an Ellroy tale without falling into the trap of kitsch period recreation for its own sake, nor overindulging in '40s noir homage nearly to the point of unintentional parody.

In sharp contrast, compare DAHLIA to another De Palma vintage excursion like THE UNTOUCHABLES, which celebrated a 1930s G-man shotgun romp through Chicago's institutionalized crimeworld without wallowing in the period effects sheerly for style points. There the Elliot Ness/Odessa Steps recreation sizzled on the screen; here, De Palma set pieces like the ambush at the Olympic fizzle with ineffectuality as merely a scheduled sequence in the plot, its dramatic impact deflated upon arrival. Worse, its denouement is fatally undercut by the character's unbelievable story arc leading to the moment.

To quote James Ellroy's own comments on the film's release:

A personal story attends The Black Dahlia, both novel and film. It inextricably links me to two women savaged 11 years apart. These women comprise the central myth of my life. I want this piece to honor them. I want this piece to redress imbalances in my previous writings about them. I want to close out their myth with an elegy.

In the author's terms, I find it hard to believe De Palma's adaptation has achieved the status of a worth elegy for either Ellroy's murdered mother or the subject of his and the film's fascination, Elizabeth Short.

For in relegating the Black Dahlia slaying to a background tapestry for much of the film, Short is reduced to a plot thread weakly woven through three overwhelming melodramas. Thus the dramatic impact of her Hollywoodland tragedy is blunted by its de-emphasis until the film's contrived conclusion. So forcibly stylized is De Palma's interpretation of the four central characters, their actions, passions and corrupted morality fail to reflect or elegize the title character at all.

Worse, by the film's conclusion, it's as if De Palma grudgingly returns to the main theme: we now return you to the forgotten murder case already in progress. I won't spoil the revelation, but sadly this fictional solution borders on silliness, especially since it springs from a laughable set piece earlier in the story. Despite clever and eerie allusions to Paul Leni's 1928 silent classic THE MAN WHO LAUGHS, the soap-operatic climax utterly fails to convince an audience who has hung in with the film all this way to find out who killed the Dahlia and why.

It's not fair to say THE BLACK DAHLIA is a failure because it's not as enjoyable or successful an Ellroy adaptation than L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, but comparison can't help but prove that the novelists dense, complex characters and subplots can be skillfully condensed into a riveting retro drama. De Palma and Friedman missed the same mark, even if only by a little in many places, but the cumulative effect fails to be elegy to a murdered starlet, an author's mother or, more directly to its purpose, fails to spin a web of mystery capable of entrapping the imaginations or voyeuristic interests of its audience.

a Brian De Palma film THE BLACK DAHLIA opening September 15, 2006