De Palma’s The Black
Dahlia is a controversial film, but not due to its content. I felt that it was dismissed a little too easily;
mostly by people who either don’t know much about De Palma or who knew too much
and were disappointed that it didn’t measure up to previous works. The problem with a knee-jerk rejection of a
De Palma film is that time always tends to vindicate him more than his
critics. With the narrow exception of Carrie (1976), I’m not sure that a
single one of his films were greeted as a masterpiece. Contemporary reviews ranged from lukewarm to
hostile on several major films now commonly thought of as classics or cult
classics; Sisters (1973), Dressed to Kill (1980), Blow Out (1981), Scarface (1983), Carlito’s
Way (1993). To cite a more recent
example, 2002’s Femme Fatale, soundly
condemned as a failure by almost everyone, is slowly but deliberately rising in
esteem in the public mind; the kind of film upon which return visits tend to
open up new perspectives. The message
here is that films produced by (what Truffaut called) a “cinematic mind” tend
to reward repeated viewings, and films that are welcomed with universal
rapturous acclaim tend to be the flimsiest and most transparent works of
sentiment or agitprop. This, in a
nutshell, is why I admire De Palma. He
is not just a filmmaker but a particularly cinematic
filmmaker. Some see his style as
mere showing off, but I only see someone who is passionate about the properties
of cinema and wants to share that love with an audience. His films may not induce world peace or give
us the warm fuzzies but there is a sharp, tangible pleasure to be felt in
experiencing the complex, rigorous, labyrinthine set-pieces that De Palma
constructs. Femme Fatale was comprised almost entirely of such sequences, and
I’d say the only major weakness of The
Black Dahlia is that there are not enough of them. Based on James Ellroy’s conjectural novel
about the notoriously gruesome unsolved murder of aspiring actress Elizabeth
Short, the film saddles De Palma with an unnecessarily convoluted plot
involving two L.A. cops (played by Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart) who uncover
overlapping layers of corruption in high society, the entertainment industry
and the criminal underworld. I might’ve preferred
De Palma just concocting his own minimalist story around the Dahlia case, but
as it is, the film is still a tour-de-force of architectural design. Shot mostly on sets constructed in Bulgaria ,
the film gets its formalist noir-tinged
atmosphere not only from De Palma, but from an impressive and legendary crew
including cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, production designer Dante Ferretti
and composer Mark Isham. Its strengths
come from De Palma doing what he loves, which is using the camera to underscore
the links between cinema and voyeurism; in extended POV shots and in the
lingering scenes of Elizabeth Short being screen tested and bullied by an
unseen director (voiced by De Palma himself).
Where it stumbles a bit is in its loyalty to Ellroy’s plot, which makes
it necessary to deal with a prolonged climax comprised of a ton of verbal
exposition instead of one of De Palma’s trademark suspense-action
sequences. Even so, De Palma doesn’t
treat these scenes flippantly; every shot and angle are thought out to express
the emotional point-of-view of the characters.
This makes them valid even though we may still always be hoping for
something a little meatier. Long story
short: I have a feeling that in the future, The
Black Dahlia will be regarded as a minor classic in the same way that some
of De Palma’s older films are now.
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