THE BLACK DAHLIA Review d: Brian De Palma

THE BLACK DAHLIA (2006)

Direction: Brian De Palma

Cast: Josh Hartnett, Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, Scarlett Johansson, Mia Kirshner, Mike Starr, Fiona Shaw, Patrick Fischler

Screenplay: Josh Friedman; from James Ellroy's novel

Oscar Movies

Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, The Black Dahlia

THE BIG SNOOZE

Stylized without being stylish, intricate without being intriguing, heavy without being dramatic. That pretty much sums up director Brian De Palma and screenwriter Josh Friedman's adaptation of James Ellroy's crime novel The Black Dahlia — though other adjectives such as "overlong," "incomprehensible," "phony," and "inane" would also apply. (See film synopsis.)

Loosely inspired by the gruesome, real-life 1940s murder of film starlet Elizabeth Short, The Black Dahlia is a twisted morality tale about characters driven by ambition, greed, lust, madness, revenge, and bad dinner conversations. It is also proof that what is often referred to as "neo-film noir" is neither new nor noir, but merely the age-old debasing of a much-revered film genre. After all, Hollywood filmmakers and their myriad imitators around the world have been committing that sort of crime for decades.

From the film's first sequence — a Los Angeles street fight involving cops, zoot suiters, and sailors — to the final credits more than two long hours later, De Palma and Friedman seem to have set their minds on mimicking "film noir" without actually recreating it.

Like most of the best-known American film noirs, The Black Dahlia is appropriately set in 1940s Los Angeles (though some of it was shot in Bulgaria). Men and women dress according to fashions of the period; they fall in lust and have unbridled sex; and they murder, lie, and cheat on one another. The superficial conventions of the genre are all there, along with scenes supposed to remind audiences of noir classics such as John Huston's The Maltese Falcon and Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd. — and of several previous De Palma flicks as well, among them Obsession, itself an "homage" to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.

Missing, however, is the crucial film noir atmosphere — the chiaroscuro compositions, the suspenseful climax, the sense of foreboding. The play of light-and-shadow is all but absent from The Black Dahlia, which offers plenty of killings like any TV cop show but little suspense and no feeling of doom. It's as if the filmmakers were amateur painters intent on recreating a master's work of art, while putting all their efforts on arranging the prettiest frame for their work.

Since I haven't read James Ellroy's novel, I can't say how many of the plot contrivances and bad lines (the few that can be understood, since much of the dialogue is as muddled as the plot) should be blamed on Ellroy, and how many should be blamed on Friedman, De Palma, and the assorted powers-that-be behind the making of The Black Dahlia. But surely the ostentatious camera setups, the off-key music (by Mark Isham, who did a much better job scoring Crash), the sterile cinematography (by Vilmos Zsigmond, who also shot Robert Altman's dreary 1973 neo-noir The Last Goodbye), and the desultory acting are the filmmakers' fault and no one else's.

As so often happens in Brian De Palma's films, the performances in The Black Dahlia are below par. An overly powdered Fiona Shaw, however, playing her foaming-at-the-mouth matriarch less like Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond and more like a cross between Maggie Smith in Travels with My Aunt and Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest, does manage to steal the few scenes in which she appears. (Admittedly, Shaw's over-the-top performance is definitely not for everybody.) Also, Mia Kirshner looks stunning in black and white, and does a credible job as the doomed Dahlia in the film-within-a-film sequences.