It's a parlour game every film fan has played, figuring out which of today's actors has the movie-star-stuff that would have made him great in the classic era.
Whether deliberately or not, Brian DePalma has created a litmus test with The Black Dahlia -- a painstakingly imagined '40s detective noir story about one of the most infamous grisly murders in Hollywood history.
Taken from the novel by James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential), The Black Dahlia is so meticulously envisioned, from graininess to sets to lighting to mood, that it seems like a Raymond Chandler film. Add the many black-and-white audition reels of wannabe-actress/ murder victim Elizabeth Short (Mia Kirshner) and you have a cinematic anachronism.
That is where the "movie star test" comes in. Scarlett Johansson seems to belong in the milieu of the Barbara Stanwycks and Veronica Lakes. On the other hand, Hilary Swank, playing a "mystery woman" who's the daughter of a Scottish real-estate magnate, adopts some weird Bryn Mawr accent and tics that just might pull Kate Hepburn out of her grave to seek revenge.
The Black Dahlia is a movie that punishes performances that don't fit in (the less said about Fiona Shaw and her crazy drunken dowager act the better).
A better movie in the first half than the last, The Black Dahlia introduces us to Bucky and Sgt. Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart), partners and ex-boxers whose relationship is born out of a bloody charity boxing match that earns them the press nickname Fire and Ice. Blanchard lives with the mysterious Kay in a relationship apparently forged by the conviction of a brutal hood.
While you're figuring this out, Kay is making her intentions known to Bucky, even as Bucky and Lee juggle several crime cases at once, all of which may or may not be connected.
Confused? Get used to it. The gruesome Black Dahlia murder doesn't enter the picture until almost 40 minutes in, and there are so many other suspects that you start to think Short's murder might be a Hitchcock style "Maguffin," that is, something that looms over everything but isn't ultimately important. I won't say whether this is the case, but The Black Dahlia uses not one but two lengthy "explanation" scenes in the last act, the kind writers lean on when they've run out of ways to wrap.
Still, it's the kind of movie where style covers up myriad sins.
Bottom line: Brian DePalma pulls out all the stops to make a literal 1940s film noir, from sets to lighting to mood -- the kind of mystery that needs not one, but two, consecutive scenes of last-act Byzantine explanation. It's a wonderfully shot film that demands its actors show old-movie-star mettle. Some, like Scarlett Johansson, are up to it. Others, like Hilary Swank, are not.
(This film is rated 14A)
More Movie Reviews
