The Black Dahlia: Left me grinning from ear to ear*

So first, the most positive thing I can think of to say about The Black Dahlia: It had me laughing from start to finish!

The thing is, I don’t think that it meant to. The biggest failing of this movie—and there are plenty to choose from--is that it doesn’t seem to know what it means to do or wants to be. Is it neo-noir? An homage to the great noir movies of the past? A parody of those movies? It can’t decide! The director may have one idea, the writer has another, and I’m fairly certain that no two of the actors would agree about what sort of movie they were filming.

I’ve seen a few reviews that tried to sell it as a parody or a pastiche, saying that the actors were purposefully doing over-the-top ‘40’s style acting, but the acting in this movie is beyond o-t-t. It’s your basic High School drama all caps bad ACTING. It’s the way you would act if you were in a movie about a ‘40’s actor, and you played all of the scenes from his life straight, and then played scenes where he's acting as burlesque. But with this movie, you never get the relief of the straight scenes. You get 2 hours and 15 minutes of burlesque. Bad, bad burlesque.

It’s also a mistake to try and sell the story of James Ellroy’s novel as a straightforward noir. Ellroy’s novels** aren’t, strictly speaking, noir novels—they’re noir in negative. They use the psychological and physical tropes of the pulps, but then over-expose the brutality of the genre under the blistering hot sun of Los Angeles (you can quote me on that). They often read as a bricolage of older crime genres—a collision of film noir, hard boiled detective novels, and police procedural shows like Dragnet.

In that way, the reviews that complain about the movie being derivative (especially those that mention the myriad ways it knocks off Chinatown and The Big Sleep) are missing the point. And anyway, it’s 2006. Everything is derivative. That doesn’t have to mean that it fucking sucks. And this movie does. The acting fucking sucks. The writing fucking sucks. Even some of the costumes fucking suck.

Some of my gripes with the film:

Script. I know Ellroy’s novels are ridiculously complex***. Everything in them is connected—you can't afford to skim or to dismiss any character or subplot as insignificant because everything ties back together. The plotting in his novels is immaculate****. And I understand that they have to be simplified to work as a 2-ish hour movie. In the novel, it takes the better part of three years and a handful of career shifts for the detective to solve the mystery, and I know there’s no way you can put that all in one movie.

So I knew things would have to be changed, omitted, condensed. They did it with L.A. Confidential, and managed admirably, creating a film that honored the novel and included its most memorable moments, but managed to be its own viable and coherent entity. The Black Dahlia doesn’t do that. It’s kept a lot of moments from the novel, but left out the material necessary to understand them, or to see their relevance in terms of the story.

The best example I can think of here is the connection between the murder and Victor Hugo’s novel The Man Who Laughs. They kept the Hugo element in without ever explaining anything about the plot of that novel or its significance in terms of how Elizabeth Short was killed. If I didn’t know Ellroy’s book backwards, forwards, and sideways, I would’ve been left going “what the fuck?”

There was also some weird attempt to make Bucky (Josh Hartnett’s character) a straightforward good-guy cop forced to deal with the realities of a bad, bad world. Um, wrong! The Bucky of Ellroy’s novel is a draft dodger who rats out his Japanese childhood friends to secure a place in the Police Academy; who puts his father in a home not out of affection or even a sense of responsibility, but because the old man’s involvement in the German American Bund is a liability to Bucky’s ascent as a celebrity cop. He also has a lot more blood on his hands than the movie version. Ellroy doesn’t write straightforward good-guy cops*****; his books deliberately dismantle the picture of the golden LAPD officer walking the straight and narrow. His protagonists aren’t the good cops of Dragnet, they’re the morally ambiguous anti-heroes of P.I. novels with the added protection of a badge to cover up their misdeeds.

Yes, I know that Hollywood really doesn’t “do” morally ambiguous all that well—though I keep hoping they’re getting better at it. But think for a moment about any of the 3 leads in L.A. Confidential—the sanctimonious Ed Exley, the corrupt Jack Vincennes, the brutal Bud White******--and the ways each of them develops over the course of the movie. Those are Ellroy characters. Where they got the idea that Bucky Bleichert should be a well intentioned but slightly befuddled schmuck is beyond me (though maybe Hartnett was just as confused by the shittasticness of the script as I was).

Final note on the script: It was a mistake, IMHO, to have Elizabeth Short in the movie. In the book, she’s always already dead--a blank space around which the plot revolves. In the movie, you get to see ennnnnnnnnnndless clips of her “screen tests.” A large part of the novel is about obsession, and how easy it is for almost every cop in LA to get immersed in the case of a girl they never knew, and never discovered much of anything concrete about. In fact, that’s a theme that recurs throughout the whole “Black Dahlia” industry—as limited and contradictory as the information is, you can’t pursue this case without it owning you on some level. One reason for this is because since so little is known about the victim, you can turn her into whatever you want. The movie destroys this by having her alive on screen. You hear two words from this nice, boring girl, and you wonder why anyone would bother thinking about her twice, much less throwing their lives away over her.

Acting. Was bad, bad, bad. A few notes to the major players:

Hilary Swank: in high school, we used to joke that Leonardo DiCaprio was “instant actor, just add water” because he got soaking wet at least once in each of his movies. By the same token, I’m beginning to realize that Hilary Swank cannot act her way out of a wet paper bag unless her breasts are bound. The two movies where she ties her boobs down, she wins Oscars. The rest are pure shit. She spends a great deal of this movie doing a really bad impersonation of Lauren Bacall. And girlfriend looks hit. They’ve waxed her eyebrows like a Romulan’s, and sharpened her jaw to a point that could poke your eye out. Some contemporary actresses should never wear ‘40’s fashions because it just highlights how bony, nasty and WRONG their bodies are. Hilary Swank is one of those.

It doesn’t help that half the dialogue in the movie talks about how much she looks like the Black Dahlia when she looks nothing like the actress playing the Black Dahlia. No matter how many times you tell us they look alike, we can tell it ain’t true (again, this could be avoided by not having Short in the movie).

Scarlett Johansson: Meh. She’s basically a nonentity in the film—though she does get to have awesomely bad turkey throwing sex on the table with Josh Hartnett. What sticks in my mind the most is one scene where she’s supposed to be all sexy and everything, but she’s wearing the ugliest 1940’s panty-girdle in the world. It made me think of Michael Kors in the first episode of Project Runway this year: “It’s like, oh yeah, you’re real alluring wearing your gramma’s panties.”

I don’t care what year it is or how chubbly you are ladies: though we all need a foundation garment sometimes, they are never ever sexy.

Josh Hartnett spends about 2/3 of the movie looking confused, and the rest of it in bed. At about the two hour mark, you get to see his naked ass. It’s like a little reward to you for staying that long: “thank you for watching our crappy movie. It’s almost over, we promise. Enjoy some Josh Hartnett ass.”

I have nothing else to stay about his performance. I spent a lot of time trying decide whether he looks like a friend of mine so that I could force myself to care about what happened to him. I ultimately found myself wishing he looked like someone I hated so that I could root for people to kick his ass.

Patrick Fishler. I know—“who?” Patrick Fishler plays “Jewboy District Attorney” Ellis Loew. Ellis Loew is the only role that crosses over between this film and L.A. Confidential*******, and Patrick Fishler absolutely desecrates a role that Ron Rifkin did wonders in. We’re talking abominable, Louis Cancelmi style, "why don't you just give up” acting.

Mr. Fishler, I’ve read every one of James Ellroy’s books. I know Ellis Loew. I’ve worked with Ellis Loew. Ellis Loew was a friend of mine. Mr. Fishler, you are no Ellis Loew.

Sundries

1) to explain the title from the Friday night post: after the words THE END flashed on the screen, and the laughter of the audience mingled with bursts of relieved applause, one woman in front of us said “that was easily the second worst movie I’ve ever seen.” So mysterygirl! asked her “what was the worst?” And she replied “Soul Plane.”

I turned off Soul Plane about halfway through, so I can’t quite decide whether I agree with her.

2) This is the first time I’ve ever felt guilty about asking friends to go to a movie with me. So guilty that I tried to talk them out of paying me back for the tickets. We could’ve done so many more enjoyable things with that time. Like. . .well, just about anything. So, mysterygirl!, Grad School Reject, and Cracklin’ Rosie, if you want to come over and watch Soul Plane sometime, I’ll fry you some dinner and we can decide which one is actually worse.

3) Please don’t let the suckiness of this movie talk you out of reading Ellroy’s novel. It is absolutely masterful, and deserves a better reputation than this shitfest is going to garner it.

4) I haven't even gone into the myriad ways this movie tries to rip off the film version of L.A. Confidential, from the scoring (the main theme opens with the same three tormented trumpet notes as Jerry Goldsmith's haunting "L.A. Confidential" theme), to the dialogue (Loew refers to Eckhart's character, Lee Blanchard as a "political animal," the same epithet that is more aptly applied to Exley), to the Very! Angry! Sex! (seriously, they throw a fucking turkey), to Scarlett Johansson's entire performance (not that Kim Bassinger is exactly Sarah Bernhardt, but in this film, at least Scarlett Johansson isn't even Kim Bassinger).

5) “Fire and Ice,” (manly sob). “Fire . . .and Ice.” Seriously, Hartnett. Grow a pair.

6) “You don’t want to kill me. You want to fuck me. And you’re too scared to do either.” I’d be scared to fuck you too, Hilary. You might stab me to death with your pointy chin or jutting collar bones, or I might drown in your disgusting concave chest.

7) “Ca-CAW! Ca-CAW!” That is the sound of mysterygirl!’s favorite character, “Crow,” as he lands on the festering corpse of this movie.

Sorry for the tome, folks, but I felt pretty strongly about this hot mess. Now I'm going to go watch L.A. Confidential, and remind myself that there are people in this world who can make a great movie out of a great novel. Here's hoping that ten or fifteen years from now, when we've all forgotten this moldering piece of monkey shit, one of those directors takes a crack at The Black Dahlia.

*Ba-dum, ching!
**Excuse me while I go into raving fangirl mode here for a moment. James Ellroy, you mad genius bastard, I love you. I love you so much that it scares me shitless sometimes. I worry that loving you makes me a bad scholar and a worse feminist. Reading your books is the mental equivalent of being carried to bed by a man twice my size: all I can hope to do is stop thinking and just hang on, enjoy the ride, and hope it doesn’t kill me. Call me, ‘kay?
***This would be one of the things that makes me love him.
****Another of the things that makes me love him: his use of immaculate, controlled plotting to depict a world gone absolutely haywire.
*****Or straightforward any kind of anything, for that matter. Love you!
******Mmmmm. The brutal Bud White. Glaaaaaaarrrrrrrghhhh.
*******Not the only crossover between the books, though. Come on, De Palma, if you're going to try and cash in on a better film, go all the way with it.