My apologies to Jack Bludis. But sitting through The Black
Dahlia was one of the most dispiriting experiences I've had
in a movie theater in ages.
Every Brian DePalma movie yields its share of treasures, and
this one is no exception. There are several terrific set
pieces. The discovery of the Dahlia's corpse was particularly
well done. Talk about surreal. Fiona Shaw plays unhinged in
high style. And it's nice to see veteran character actor Mike
Starr land a plum role as Detective Russ Millard.
But the film completely lacks the sense of obsession that
gives Ellroy's novel its power. The ghost of Elizabeth Short
is never far away in the book, whereas the movie seems to
stop itself cold every twelve minutes for a scene in which
someone says, "And remember that dead woman!" All this
frenzied motion with nothing at the core driving it.
Consider Short's audition reel, in which DePalma himself
provides the voice of the director. We see Bleichert (Josh
Hartnett) screening this footage several times during the
course of the film. But DePalma doesn't include the material
in a way that indicates Bleichert is watching the footage
over and over again; the composition and wardrobe in the
Bleichert reaction shots seems to be identical, so it looks
as if we're seeing a single screening broken down into chunks
and scattered throughout the film. The scenes are used as
punctuation to break up the action.
Aside from forgetting Betty Short, the script never weaves
the disparate plot threads together into a satisfying whole.
At times it's like three separate movies playing at once, all
of them finally coming together because, well, we've all got
homes to go to.
It makes for a stark contrast with the adaptation of L.A.
Confidential, which in many respects is a far more
complicated novel. Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson unpacked
every element of that book and then recombined them in a
manner that was fleet and cinematic without sacrificing
texture. Here, Josh Friedman is faithful to a fault. I was
surprised that the material about Bleichert's father was in
the movie. It's fascinating stuff on the page, deadly
onscreen. In L.A. Confidential, the novel, Ed Exley's father
Preston is alive, well, and a key player. In the movie, he's
long dead, and that allows for the invention of Rollo Tomasi,
one of the finest bits of screenwriting I've seen.
A. O. Scott has a piece on the critical response to DePalma's
career in today's New York Times. You can find it here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/movies/17scot.html
In it, he lists several elements common to DePalma films,
including mysterious doubles, films-within-films, femme
fatales, voyeurism, and complex acts of violence set in
elevators or stairwells. All present and accounted for in The
Black Dahlia. What's interesting is how many of them are
already there in Ellroy's book. Maybe that's part of the
problem. Maybe Ellroy and DePalma are too simpatico, so alike
that their collaboration feels second-hand.
For me, Hollywoodland is easily the better film. It doesn't
have any of DePalma's visual panache, but then again it
doesn't need to. It has a story to tell.
Vince Keenan
www.vincekeenan.com Pop culture, high and low, past and
present. One day at a time.
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