WhatzUp

The Black Dahlia
by Derek Neff

For several reasons The Black Dahlia begs comparison with Curtis Hanson's 1997 masterpiece L.A. Confidential. From the lovingly constructed late-1940s sets to the increasingly complex story (both movies were adapted from large, dense novels by James Ellroy), to the gritty film noir dialogue, both movies are enough like each other to be brothers. This is bad news for The Black Dahlia, because in no conceivable way is it even a fraction as good as its illustrious big brother.

The Black Dahlia is directed by Brian De Palma, which is a dead giveaway that the movie is either going to be a flawed masterpiece or a masterful disaster, since De Palma has made plenty of both. A superb craftsman, De Palma truly loves making movies, and what I've always enjoyed most about De Palma's films over the years is that even in his worst pictures his passion for cinema all but radiates from the screen. But in The Black Dahlia something seems to be holding him back, and little of his love for the craft of film registers.

This might be partly due to the myriad of names, events and places one needs to keep straight just to understand what is happening on the screen. Maybe De Palma himself had to do too much narrative footwork to have time left over for any of his trademark pyrotechnics along the way. (The film was reportedly cut from three hours to just under two at the last minute, which could explain the narrative sloppiness.)

As far as the story goes, I could spend all of my limited space here trying to provide an adequate synopsis of the film, so I won't bother. A woman has been murdered, and two partners, played by Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart, become increasingly obsessed with finding out who murdered her. Eckhart's wife is played by Scarlett Johansson, and something of a love triangle is formed between the three. Beyond this ridiculously boiled-down précis I'll venture no further.

Two scenes in the film awkwardly hark back to De Palma at his best: one impressive crane shot outside a building reminded me of both the chainsaw scene in Scarface and the long opening shot in Snake Eyes; and another scene in an abandoned building with spiral stairs recalls the Union Station sequence in The Untouchables (itself an ode to the "Odessa steps" sequence in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin). It's one thing for De Palma to reference other great filmmakers – he's done that from the beginning – but when he has to stoop to vaguely referencing his own past work, the love don't 'zactly shine through, you know? And in any case, the scenes in question – and, by extension, the movie as a whole – are a muddled mess, completely lacking in both suspense and coherence, perhaps because the former demands the latter.