At the Movies: The Black Dahlia

The Black Dahlia brings together two of the most stylized masters of violence in American arts, Brian De Palma—it’s his first film in four years and just his third in this century—and the novelist James Ellroy, whose L.A. Confidential was made into a much-admired film by Curtis Hanson in 1997. De Palma has been known to overwhelm material by genre writers; his film of Stephen King’s Carriemade King’s talent seem small in comparison to his own. Ellroy’s novel, written in 1987, before he began his self-conscious attempt to become America’s Dostoyevsky, is very much a genre piece, but his often feverish sensibility is too powerful for even De Palma to tame.

Watching The Black Dahlia, I was at times reminded of the scene in Ghostbusterswhen Bill Murray suggests that his crew bring two demonically possessed characters together, and Harold Ramis mutters, “I think that could be incredibly dangerous.” The book is based on what is probably still the most shocking crime in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department, the murder of a young woman named Elizabeth Short, whose body, in 1947, was found cut in half in a vacant lot. It wasn’t simply the fact of the murder but its savagery and mutilation that stunned Los Angeles and the entire nation. Despite the most sweeping manhunt in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department, the killer was never found. 

Both Ellroy’s novel and De Palma’s film attempt to offer a plausible explanation for the murder and connect it with the rot and corruption of the city and the time. This is an old story; every L.A. novelist from Raymond Chandler (most notably in The Big Sleep) to Nathanael West (The Day of The Locust) has more or less indicted Los Angeles as accessory to murder. But Ellroy has a personal grudge: His own mother was also murdered in a case that was never solved, and he’s never stopped probing the depths of L.A.’s criminal psychology in an effort to come to terms with the irrationality of such crimes.

Clearly both writer and director are going for that noir-as-metaphor Chinatown effect, where the framework of the crime story is a device to offer a cutaway view of a city just as it is assuming its place as the mecca of the American dream. At times The Black Dahlia’s incredibly complicated plot boils over; about the last thing this movie needs is an earthquake, and there were none in 1947, but it gets one anyway. There’s an undeniable seductiveness, though, in the narrative, and also in the atmosphere, enhanced by Mark Isham’s score, with its bluesy evocation of pre- and post-World War II films set in southern California. The failure of The Black Dahlia to sustain its intensity over the last 45 minutes or so lies in the actors, who can’t summon up the icons created in those films by Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Sterling Hayden, and Lauren Bacall.

The story centers on two cops, both former professional boxers, and how the investigation of the Black Dahlia murder changes their lives. Aaron Eckhart, the sweet-faced blond apologist for the tobacco industry in Thank You for Smoking, builds up astonishing momentum as the more volatile of the two, Lee Blanchard; he seems to be expressing Ellroy’s own angst. But Josh Hartnett, though he struggles mightily to find the center of Bucky Bleichert, lacks the depth to hold up his end—the heavier end, alas, as Bucky narrates the story à la Chandler.

More disappointing, because her promise is so much greater, is the failure of Scarlett Johansson to generate enough heat to convince as the third side of the emotional triangle. Johansson, a gifted actress and a breathtaking beauty, never finds herself in an underwritten role that depends entirely too much on the viewers’ recognition of such characters in earlier films. She is unexpectedly blown off the screen by the power of Hilary Swank—unexpected not because Swank isn’t an amazing actress, but because her turn as the bisexual daughter of the city’s wealthiest land developer takes the story beyond any world Ellroy seems to know about. There’s a knockout set piece at a lesbian dinner club, replete with K. D. Lang singing “Love for Sale” in the background, which is pure vintage De Palma. For sheer audacity, it surpasses just about any scene in an American movie this year.

For such moments, and the smartness of Dante Ferretti’s production design, and the golden-tinged cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond, you can forgive The Black Dahliafor its absurdities and lapses into near-incoherence, such as the obligatory long explanation scene near the end where more information is delivered, rapid-fire, than can possibly be digested in 30 seconds. (What you haven’t figured out by that point in the movie, you’re probably not going to figure out anyway.) Complacency and clarity were never what noir—or Brian De Palma or James Ellroy—was about in the first place.