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

REVIEW: Brick

Brick (dir. Rian Johnson, 2005) *****

reviewed by David Sugarman

Is there any genre with as poor a track record as the high school movie? Against that legacy is set this indie debut from film-school graduate Rian Johnson. Brick is a gem of a film, ingeniously mashing two of the most American of genres as high schooler Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) turns detective to investigate the death of his former girlfriend Emily (Emilie de Ravin). In his investigation Brendan must navigate through a rogues gallery of drug dealers, informants, femme fatales and the school authorities.

Brick is my favourite film of all time. I expect I have seen it on more than ten occasions since I first saw it on TV in 2007, and each time I see it I love it even more. Each time I watch it I find something new to love: the local drug baron The Pin (Lukas Haas) and his fondness for Tolkien; his homicidal sidekick Tugger (Noah Fleiss) and his crew of identical wife-beater wearing thugs; and the self-obsessed quarterback, Brad Bramish, and his prize routine comeback of “Yeah?”.

There’s not much about Brick that is genuinely original as such, but the skill and confidence with which Johnson throws such disparate elements into play together equals more than the sum of its parts, and proves again and again that you just can’t beat a great script delivered by good performances. Johnson’s dynamic directorial style makes his Sundance award winning debut such a joy to watch that any attempt to define Brick solely by its genre really cannot accurately convey the tone of the picture. Fantastic.