The movie which sent its director into the wilderness, and nuked its star’s rise, The Black Dahlia was a movie I had completely forgotten about.
I never saw it on release, and it only piqued my interest recently because I finally watched its more illustrious predecessor, 1997’s LA Confidential.
I watched this movie a couple of days later - I probably should have put more space between.
LA Confidential feels like a fully realised world where you could follow any of the characters into their own story.
It also feels incredibly clear in terms of its characters and the plotting.
At no point does it feel like the movie is losing its focus.
The filmmaking seems unconcerned with adhering to familiar noir style yet feels completely anchored to classic Hollywood storytelling.
I had heard The Black Dahlia was not good, the lesser sibling to Curtis Hanson’s all-conquering 1997 film.
I caught LA Confidential on Netflix and I decided to complete the set by watching the second James Ellroy adaptation.
I have nothing to say about LA Confidential - it’s great.
The Black Dahlia is like the opposite of LA Confidential.
It has a massive canvas and a specific milieu.
It has no sense of focus - as the mystery starts to get wrapped up, I started to get confused.
Brian DePalma brings his specific obsessions - the death on the staircase is incredible - but the film never coalesces.
The thing the movie has is a sense of people hollowed out by their past regrets.
Josh Hartnett is an actor I need to investigate more.
I remember when he was a star - l can remember him being dismissed, another young, good looking guy who Hollywood wanted to push on audiences.
I really liked him earlier this year in Guy Ritchie’s Operation Fortune, and it made me start rethinking him.
Hartnett is so quiet and muted here, but I could not take my eyes off of him.
He reminds me of Channing Tatum.
Tatum’s special power is his vulnerability and this seeming ability to appear completely lost in whatever situation he is in.
Hartnett does not seem as stupid as Tatum but has a similar emotional inarticulacy. He seems like a good looking, goodhearted giant who is just trying to make his way in the world.
He might not be a matinee idol but he is more interesting than I gave him credit for.
Hillary Swank is making choices but I am baffled by them - she has an affected, mid-Atlantic accent.
She seems to be aiming for forties femme fatale but goes too far and comes off as a character in an SNL sketch.
Unlike LA Confidential, this is a movie conscious of classic noir in its style, and Hollywood more broadly - Vilmos Zsigmond‘s photography evokes the chiaroscuro of the black and white era, while we get several cutaways to the silent film The Man who Laughs, whose central character turns out to be a pivotal clue to solving the mystery.
Another familiar note in the movie’s song sheet (sorry) is Mark Isham’s score, which evokes both the time period and DePalma’s frequent collaborator Pino Donaggio in his Bernard Hermann mode.
Aside from Hartnett, the one performer who charges the movie with life is Mia Kirshner as the titular character.
There is one moment of her performance that haunts me - during one of the screen tests, as the offscreen director berates her, Kirshner’s mouth is half-fallen, her eyes holding back tears.
It is the moment in the film where we see Elizabeth Short’s dream shaken.
It is the closest she comes to breaking onscreen, and it is the most vulnerable, human moment in the film.
Kirshner’s evocation of Short’s humanity is so potent it lays bare the hollowness of the film around her.
For a filmmaker who has juggled sex, violence and the cinematic qualities of both, one can see why DePalma would be drawn to Ellroy’s take on the Short/Dahlia story.
Perhaps the original cut would offer a different perspective, but on the basis of the film we have, the film’s revelations carry no weight.
The solving of Short’s murder comes across as a side effect, a minor note in a grander narrative of upper-class depravity.
Despite some horrific imagery - Short’s body is only briefly glimpsed - the film is strangely diffuse in terms of building tension and sustaining a mood.
A hazy epic of rot and shattered dreams in Hollywood, a vague examination of crisis in post-war American masculinity and a pulpy noir, The Black Dahlia is playing in a lot of different sandpits, but is not fully effective in any of them.
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