REVIEW: The Black Dahlia

The Black Dahlia (dir. Brian De Palma, 2006) either * or **

reviewed by David Sugarman

Based on legendary crime writer James Ellroy’s book, itself based on a real crime in mid-’40s LA, The Black Dahlia is a brilliantly shot noir pastiche by American director Brian De Palma. I cannot stress this enough: the cinematography of this film is just brilliant. Herein lies the problem with The Black Dahlia: when it works, it works well; but by the time I reached the end I found myself wondering if I even cared whether the good bits were any good. Because the bits that don’t work suck.

Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart are two former boxers on the LAPD, investigating the murder of a young wannabe-Hollywood starlet. Hartnett’s character is a kind of stoic non-entity, but that’s OK: we don’t expect to learn a huge amount about the detective in a noir. God knows, the audience barely learns anything about Marlowe in The Maltese Falcon. Eckhart’s officer is a tortured fella with an uninteresting past that is eventually revealed to highly melodramatic and largely irrelevant effect too late in the film to effect the audience’s opinion of him. To be honest, I should be praising Hartnett and Eckhart for being the only members of the cast to play the film straight; every other actor in the film goes at the hammy noir dialogue like it’s a jokeless parody.

For the first hour, I can forgive The Black Dahlia its faults. After that, its becomes a horrible, tangled mess of a movie that ends up being laughable in its attempts at shocking drama. De Palma is caught between making a modern movie and paying homage to the films of classic noir, a genre now largely relegated to independent productions.

I don’t want to say “You can’t have it both ways” in an attempt to modernise a dormant genre, because that’s exactly what Brick does so effectively. Maybe because Brick‘s genre-mash of the old school noir and modern high-school movie (see what I did there?) mutates the stylistic expectations of the genre, freeing writer-director Rian Johnson from the formal approach associated with classic noir, whereas De Palma sets out The Black Dahlia as a straight noir with no such conceit to free himself from the genre restraints. Consequently it frequently feels just as confused and brainless as any mainstream Hollywood crime movie. It’s not hard-boiled, it’s just over-cooked.

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Two stars if you think I should definitely take into account the film’s meagre successes.

One star if you think two implies that the film is in any way worth watching all the way through.

David