ScreenWize

Film noir is often deliberately confusing, compensating with a dark brooding style and richly tortured characters strung out in complex relationships. Black Dahlia director Brian De Palma gets too obsessed with the look - filling the screen with busy police stations, busy L.A. streets, and people busily lighting up - to notice that the story and the performances have got away from him.

The film opens on Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) and Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett), police buddies and ex-boxers known as Mr. Fire and Mr. Ice, signifying their different approaches to fighting, work, and life. When assigned to the ‘Black Dahlia’ case involving the brutal murder of a young woman, Lee gets increasingly edgy as Bucky starts digging behind the seedy scenes of Hollywood, organized crime and ex-cons. He turns up more sub-plots than the film can handle, one involving Lee’s girlfriend Kay (Scarlett Johansson), who seems to have an interest in both the case and in Bucky. Another surrounds the wealthy Linscott family whom Bucky meets through the mysterious femme fatale Madeleine Linscott (Hilary Swank). A third involves a nasty criminal about to be released from jail.

The film meanders from one storyline to another, loosing its focus, and never allowing time for the psychological development that we need in order to understand what’s at stake for the two cop-buddies. It is their relationship – both in the ring and on patrol - that kicks off the story, but this becomes increasingly irrelevant as the story sidetracks into lesbian nightclubs, cheap motels and casting couches. Based on a book by James Ellroy (who also wrote the well adapted L.A. Confidential), the script by Josh Friedman is an unwieldy adaptation that tries too hard to do too much. The set up is long and flat and the final unraveling of the mystery is only made possible with a series of unlikely co-incidences all explained in melodramatic who-dunnit fashion in a grand house full of overcooked characters.

Both Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart struggle to make anything of their roles and – like many of the other performances – verge into melodrama. The best performance is from the Black Dahlia victim herself (Mia Kirshner) whose sad short life we see through audition clips.

With so much potential involved, this film is a sad disappointment: there are only a few moments where story, acting, and direction come together to generate the kind of intensity that psychological thrillers demand. The rest is lifeless.

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Filed Under: Reviews by Simon