Film Reviews
By Nathaniel Bell

Soft-Boiled Noir

A big, beautiful bore, “The Black Dahlia” signals Brian De Palma's first full-blooded foray into film noir territory, a genre whose aesthetics have influenced his style throughout his varied career. Because De Palma is a filmmaker with an unerring eye for glossy surfaces, it's no surprise that his movie is one of the best looking of the year. Vilmos Zsigmond's burnished, old-Hollywood cinematography captures the feel of 1940's Los Angeles with a palette of earthy browns and impenetrable blacks, but the visual pomp is wasted on a story that wanders in circles.

Based on the book by James Ellroy, which is itself inspired by a notorious unsolved murder that occurred in Los Angeles in 1947, the movie begins breathlessly. Its two lead characters (police officers Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard, played by Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckert) are first glimpsed pummeling their way through a street riot littered with cops and sailors. Both men are part-time prizefighters who once faced each other in the ring, but their friendship is put on hold when the body of Elizabeth Short (Mia Kirshner) is discovered, cut in half at the waist and horrifically mutilated.

The scenes leading up to this discovery are inarguably exciting, but De Palma insists on diverting attention away from the homicide subplot with a parade of gaudy supporting characters, including a treacherously seductive vamp named Madeleine (Hilary Swank). A dinner with Madeleine's dysfunctional family becomes one of the film's highlights, and Fiona Shaw gives a brilliant, showy performance as a boozy wreck of a debutante. Scarlett Johansson has little to do but skulk around as Bucky's would-be girlfriend.

In these postmodern times it's impossible to make a film noir without being self-conscious about it, and screenwriter Josh Friedman's hardboiled dialogue sounds funny coming out of Josh Hartnett. Well groomed and pokerfaced, Hartnett looks good in a fedora but can't sustain interest as a leading man. Eckert fares much better as his confrontational partner who becomes obsessed with tracking down the Black Dahlia killer.

Uninterested in mapping the trajectory of Bucky's spiritual development (or, in this case, his spiritual decline), the film is even more despairing than “Chinatown,” which at least offered the consolation of a coherent resolution. “The Black Dahlia,” with its oblique final scene, offers no such closure, and you get the sense that there's something grander and more important De Palma is trying to coax out of the stubbornly inert material.

For all its melodramatic excesses (stag films, grinning corpses, splashes of gore), “The Black Dahlia” emerges as empty spectacle—a “who cares?” whodunit.

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