Venice diary - 'The Black Dahlia' review

David Jenkins examines the latest film from Brian de Palma.

Sep  1 2006

Well, it's been two days since my festival cherry was officially popped and I must admit, it's kind of as I imagined it would be, albeit with fewer fedora/Ray Ban combos and more 'I Heart Kierostami' t-shirts (I saw one, which is probably one too many). From my experience so far, it's a lot like being at a music festival: you get your hardcore front-of-every-queue types who diligently timetable their daily film watching and get quietly perturbed by any delay, then you get the people who'll just watch a couple of the big films, but they're really here to have Camparis with the haughty industry types.

Bands wise, Douglas McGrath's Truman Capote biopic 'Infamous' would be The Strokes; well produced and with many wonderful moments, but ultimately too derivative for long-term admiration. Spike Lee's 'When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts' (of which there'll be more later) would be Bruce Springsteen; impassioned, unashamedly political and plays sets that last for hours and hours.

By those standards, the opening film at the 63rd Venice Festival – Brian de Palma's 'The Black Dahlia' – would probably be Genesis: lumbering, overcomplicated and unfashionable like you wouldn’t believe. It's his first film since 2002's 'Femme Fatale', which didn't make it to these shores for reasons of quality control, and it's average in a way that only de Palma could get away with.

Based on James Ellroy's noir novel of the same name, the story focuses (the term is used loosely) on the shocking real-life murder of Elizabeth Short who was given the name The Black Dahlia on account of her resemblance to Veronica Lake in 'The Blue Dahlia'. Arriving in Hollywood with dreams of stardom, 'Betty' never manages to score any big parts, and like so many bright young things before her is forced to strut her stuff in a couple of 'stag movies' in order to pay the rent.

When her severely mutilated corpse is later discovered in a ditch (with the aid of a beautiful, roving crane shot), Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) and Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) are the cops assigned to the case, and like all Ellroy adaptations, black is white, up is down and nothing is what it initially seems. Things start to get messy when Bleichert soon finds himself attracted to the enigmatic property heiress Madeline Linscott (Hilary Swank) who he meets in a lesbian club and, is later shocked to discover, is a lesbian.

The plot then splays out wildly, incorporating hundreds of little micro-plots which you hope will all be resolved in the end but never are. The period setting is by-the-numbers stuff (it could actually be the same set, props and extras used for 'LA Confidential') and the snappy dialogue never feels right coming out of the mouths of these actors. Scarlett Johannson, who plays Blanchard's wife, is also a real problem as her twenty-a-day croak and indie girl demeanor don't help to pass her off as the femme fatale she's supposed to be.

On the plus side, Eckhart and Swank are both great in their secondary roles, and de Palma demonstrates that he still knows how to work a movie camera, and then some. The key problem comes in the form of arch meathead Hartnett who, certainly at this screening, prompted the odd titter from his attempts at emotion (crying especially) and really didn't supply the character with the moral ambiguity he so desperately needed. His face is just so un-expressive (perhaps due to his freakishly small eyes) that he goes from scene to scene with exactly the same facial expression and delivers the lines in an annoying baritone drawl which sounds like a small child mimicking an old man.

Overall, an interesting start to the festival from a director who only needs one more great film in order to seal his reputation as one of the greats. Sadly, this isn't it.

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