Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...

Brian De Palma is a major American film artist. His place in the pantheon of the great ‘70s generation is absolutely deserved. Anyone who dismisses De Palma by invoking the name of Hitchcock just plain misses the point. De Palma is a master craftsman, as adept in the language of film as any of his peers.

But for some reason, he can’t catch a fucking break.

He made a lot of films before he got around to SISTERS in 1973, which is the moment where he started to put it all together. He made a classic his next time out with PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE, and another classic two years later with CARRIE, which was his first giant hit movie. CARRIE was a pop culture landmark, making both De Palma and Stephen King in the same moment. I like THE FURY, HOME MOVIES, and DRESSED TO KILL, but I think BLOW OUT is a goddamn masterpiece, a great movie that any suspense fan would do well to study. It’s not just empty technique, either. BLOW OUT breaks my heart. It features the best work John Travolta’s ever done on film, and a great creepy John Lithgow performance. SCARFACE is a full-blown cult phenomenon at this point, and deservedly so. See a great print in a theater, with a big crowd, and you will appreciate the genius and majesty of SCARFACE.

I have a general love for many of his other films. BODY DOUBLE. THE UNTOUCHABLES. CASUALTIES OF WAR. Especially CASUALTIES OF WAR. CARLITO’S WAY. The generally-hated-but-deliriously-bizarre RAISING CAIN. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE. There are very few of his films I actively dislike, but the ones I do are just ambitious misfires, failures that overreach. BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES. SNAKE EYES. MISSION TO MARS.

In my fantasyland version of Hollywood, where people are rewarded for being talented, De Palma would work a lot, and he’d get his pick of mainstream properties. De Palma would be A-plus-list, just like his peers Lucas and Scorsese and Spielberg.

I find myself confounded by his last two films, though. My review of FEMME FATALE was mixed. I have watched it a few times since, and I find myself really impressed each time by the sheer command De Palma has over what he’s doing, even as I find myself disconnected from it. And I think it’s hilarious how I missed the biggest piece of the puzzle of the film when I wrote about it that first time. It’s even more of a head game than I first thought, and I admire that about it now.

I can’t help but wonder how my own feelings about THE BLACK DAHLIA will evolve. Right now, I’m fascinated by it, but I think it’s got some really bizarre material in it that will stop mainstream audiences cold. The film shifts from tone to tone several times, doubling back on itself in some really deranged ways. De Palma, working from a screenplay by Josh Friedman (author of one of the funniest blogs around on the days when he actually updates it), has made a reasonably faithful adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel, and in doing so, he has made one of the most overheated movies of the year, a film that veers into high camp in places (and never on purpose, which makes it truly glorious camp) even as it impresses, a film that fails as often as it succeeds.

First things first, this is not really a film about the Black Dahlia murder case. The murder and the subsequent investigation are definitely a big part of the film, but this is far more concerned with Ellroy’s characters, the policemen assigned to tracking down Elizabeth Short’s killer. For the first thirty minutes or so, there’s no indication of the Black Dahlia murder or Elizabeth Short at all. Instead, it’s all about the unlikely partnership between Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart). They meet in the middle of a Zoot Suit riot, and right away, they recognize something similar in the way they dispatch the guys attacking them, the way they run a suspect down. When the department needs to raise some money, they throw an exhibition boxing match, pitting Bucky against Lee. It’s a brutal fight, but afterwards, the two guys have a new respect for each other, and they’re partnered in a new division designed for the serving of major warrants. Bucky and Lee kick ass together, and De Palma shoots this whole first stretch of the film at a delirious pace, enjoying every bit of it.

Oh, yeah. There’s a dame. There’s always a dame.

In this case, it’s Scarlett Johansson, and she’s a visual treat. De Palma shoots her with a lecherous eye, but she never really settles into her character. I generally like her work, but she’s a stiff in this film, and as the figure of desire at the center of the story, she never really convinces. Part of me almost suspects De Palma did it on purpose in a subversive desire to make this a love story between Bucky and Lee. He certainly gives them more lingering looks of suppressed passion than the whole of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. If Kay’s a cold fish, a curiously sexless sex bomb, then it’s okay because she’s just the beard in the romantic triangle.

The crowd at the Monday night press screening was openly hostile at times, reminding me of the LADY IN THE WATER screening I went to, and it was obvious that some of the people there actively hated the movie. I think that’s because the collision of De Palma’s style and Ellroy’s style results in something so overcooked, so completely daffy, that it’s hard to tell if De Palma and his actors are kidding or not. This is definitely De Palma’s riff on the conventions of noir, from the deliberately artificial quality of the world to the pervasive voice-over to the actual stylistic choices he and his amazing cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, have made. Mark Isham’s score works just as hard as the movie does, pouring it on. I’m watching one of the Fox Film Noir releases, SHOCK, as I write this review. It’s a Vincent Price vehicle about a murderous psychiatrist, his black widow mistress, and an innocent girl who witnesses a murder. It’s got the same sort of score as the one Isham’s written for DAHLIA; big and lush and overly communicative. It tells you what to feel at every possible moment, just as much as Hartnett’s nearly-continuous narration does. But as much as I think the style of the film itself annoyed some of the viewers last Monday, it’s the narrative that led to the open hostility, and that I think will confuse and disappoint many audiences.

Yet it’s a reasonably faithful translation of James Ellroy’s book to the screen. And everyone loves and respects Ellroy... right? So what went wrong? Why doesn’t the script ultimately work?

I think Ellroy writes books that are meant to be books. Just like John Irving writes books that are meant to be books. Just like James Joyce does. Or Kurt Vonnegut. Sometimes, what works as prose won’t work as a film because what makes the prose special is the language, the play of it, the form itself. It’s the argument I hear time and again regarding any film adaptation of Alan Moore’s WATCHMEN, and I understand the position. Part of the way Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons critiqued the form of the comic book was by subverting it in very clever and powerful ways, and any adaptation automatically loses that part of the experience. BLACK DAHLIA was early in the writing career of Ellroy, and as he developed as an artist, he pushed his style further and further. BLACK DAHLIA is supercharged, pumped up, loopy at the start and loopier as it goes. By the time we’re introduced to Madeline Linscott (Hilary Swank) and her family, anyone expecting a serious period drama about a police investigation is going to be ready to run for the exit. But if what you want is one of De Palma’s jet black comedy thrillers, then BLACK DAHLIA successfully manages to meld his sensibilities with the acrobatic demands of Ellroy’s book. The result is so heightened that it does come across as silly, especially in the second half, and De Palma embraces it rather than fighting it. He takes every opportunity for his brand of visual fireworks, and there are some dazzling moments here. I love the scene where the actual body of Elizabeth Short is found, and the grand 360 crane shot that De Palma designed that makes the discovery of the body an afterthough, a digression, instead of the point. I love the way De Palma plays with the iconography of THE MAN WHO LAUGHED, the silent film that was the inspiration for the original design of The Joker. I love the set piece where one of the film’s major players meets a particularly grisly end, a scene that would feel right at home in a Dario Argento film. I love one of the few major deviations from the book, a moment in which Bucky finally metes out a bit of justice. The things I like add up, and I find that I’ve thought about this film several times since I saw it.

But much like HOLLYWOODLAND, this film doesn’t work as a whole because the story that seems most compelling ends up as background for something a lot less interesting. Try as he might, De Palma’s ultimately unable to bring the material to full life, and the result is a mixed bag, a mild diversion, hardly the best of this great filmmaker’s work.