La Dalia Negra

Have you ever been with a master storyteller who is hot? I mean in person. Its an absolutely captivating thing, watching the craft of captivating you. Its a worthy experience, even when the story isn't good. In fact, its even better when they story isn't good. You might wonder for a while why such a talented teller would choose the material she has, but will fade as you fall under spell of the storyteller, undistracted by the story. It you are lucky, she'll be a hand dancer and you will simply allow your soul to move with the undermusic.

dePalma never bothers me when he chooses bad actors, stories and such. Its just not relevant to what he has to offer, and in fact sometimes I'm thankful that the story itself doesn't get in the way. "Mission to Mars" was rewarmed tacos, but the fact that it was served by a metaphoric, genuine Spanish grandmother from her own hands was all that mattered.

About 22 minutes into this there is a wonderful crane shot, probably done without artificial assistance, beginning five minutes which is the heart of the overly complex story. It sets up two apparently unrelated threads in the story that interweave from this point. It is of the front of a building where later there will be a shooting, moves up and over the building to look at a vacant lot behind where we see a woman making a gruesome discovery. She runs to the street alongside the building where we see the car of our two cops coming to park in front and engage in a shooting. We move in front of the car to a bicyclist, who plays no role in the story. He brings us to a couple walking down the sidewalk approaching the front of the building where they will encounter our cops. We come down to street height and listen in on their conversation.

Its masterful. Even if you think everything that follows is a mess, its a glorious mess made glorious by our setting of the knitting needles.

This, my friends, is what noir is about these days: establishing an eye of god who both is us and who perturbs nature to suit conventions of coincidence in storytelling.

But there's another joy here too. The story — no surprise — features a film within the film. Its the whole story, there, with elements of that internal film overlapping the main story in three or four significant ways. The star of this inner film, who also is our bisected victim is a character played by Mia Kirshner. She's so much more alive and real than anyone else in the main story, I can only assume it was deliberate and a truly thrilling risk. If you follow film, you'll know her very similar and hugely complex role in "Exotica," a landmark film.

Two major experiences in a film! Of course its worth watching!

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

"For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak/With most miraculous organ." Shakespeare's Hamlet

Murders are messy on the screen and in real life; screenplays about them can be chaotic and disjointed also. Such is the case with Black Dahlia, a film noir from Brian De Palma, a past master of the macabre and the complicated (Blow Out, Body Double). It has all the trappings of a first-rate detective novel (James Ellroy) made into a 1940's thriller with appropriately moody music of the soulful trumpet (Mark Isham), lush production design (Dante Ferretti), and equally impressive costuming (Jenny Beavan), all set in a timelessly seedy Los Angeles.

There's also the conflicted, sometimes dark hero detective (Josh Hartnett) and the sexy, dangerous femme fatale (Hilary Swank), accompanied by the questionably good voluptuary sex bomb (Scarlett Johansson). As if these noir troublemakers were not enough, writer Josh Friedman seemingly adapts Ellroy's every subplot, every story thread, as if each had to be accounted for in the best CSI tradition.

The original novel was based on aspiring actress Elizabeth Short's unsolved grizzly murder in 1947. After a considerably convoluted exposition, with plot lines rarely intersecting in a unified way, the film has the nerve to offer one of the most extensive denouements in film history, could be a half hour, with lengthy explanation of how all those ends tied together. Needless to say, anti climaxes abound in this last segment, leaving not only more confusion about the plot but also a desire to get back to The Big Sleep without sleeping, a state Black Dahlia threatened several times.

Hartnett's detective says, "Nothing stays buried forever. Nothing." I say this weak noir wannabe should stay buried until a bright 22nd century scholar sees its cultural and aesthetic significance. Until then, it's a jumble of plot points resolved in the end by tedious narration. Even Scarlett Johansson's pulchritude couldn't win me, and that's murder in the first degree.

Yes, all of it and more. The images are beautiful but what a mess. I don't need to understand what's going on if, at least, I'm entertained. Look at The Big Sleep for instance. There will never be another "Chinatown" I'm afraid, regardless of what Mr Ellroy thinks. The one element that sees you through this inconsequential mess is Josh Harnett's face. At times he looks as confused as I did and just as annoyed. Who can blame him? Hilary Swank, what was she doing? She looked like Vampyra's sister, the boring one. What a catastrophic piece of casting. And Fiona Shaw? If the film had been all like her performance the flick could have had a chance at the campiest "noire" ever put on film ever. But not such luck. All this said and done, it's a De Palma movie and that counts for something. Black Dahlia is certainly better than Snake Eyes but as a De Palma fan I felt terribly let down.

I was disappointed in this film mainly because I love James Elroy's books and found that this film did not do it justice. The characters in the film became stereotypes or cardboard 40's characters. Scarlett Johannsen looked like a young Lana Turner on tranquilizers.........very little emotion, so much mumbling.............poor Hilary Swank was just too distracting in her black wig trying to be a 40's vamp ...........I guess we are not accustomed to seeing her that way and she evidently does not do well in sexy, seductive roles............Josh Hartnett did pretty well.........although the constant taking off of clothing of his different ladies seemed a bit tiresome......if I would have had this on video I would have fast forwarded the constant "clothes removal" scenes. James Ellroy also wrote LA Confidential and that was a masterpiece on film.........but of course, the actors were Russell Crowe, Kevin Spacey, Danny Divito, and many very well seasoned actors with a far above average script. Sorry to say that this film is not academy award material as LA Confidential was................Ellroy's stories can be told on film with good writing, competent acting, good casting, good screenplay and continuity. This was not present in The Black Dahlia. Actually, the girl who played The Black Dahlia was the most sensitive and sympathetic and portrayed her character excellently.

Anybody expecting to get a great account of the Black Dahlia case, even fictional, will be disappointed going in to this movie. Of course, I knew that it was a fictionalization of the case, but I had no idea the movie would present its own evidence and draw its own conclusions.

But the main problem here is not the lack of factual detail, so much as the confusion of plot that surrounds and overwhelms the Black Dahlia case itself. So much plot and character and sideplots and backstory are built around the central characters that the case itself seems like a distraction. A key plot point and character motivator is the fascination of the two detectives with the murder, but this is never elaborated enough in the film, and we're left to half-heartedly guess at the character motivations.

The tone is never consistently campy, but when the camp arrives it overwhelms the story. A dinner scene between a suspect and her family had the crowd in stitches (the only scene during which the audience laughed). The problem is that the scene is valuable to the plot and should never have been played for laughs. Hitchcock or even Lynch could have shot the same scene, with the same events and dialogue, and made it menacing and creepy, which it needed to be to function in the mystery.

Other problems: De Palma uses the lesbian angle of the movie (never a part of the case) to full exploitative advantage, and the actresses seem unable to master to the expressive 1940s style acting that would have come naturally to even a marginal 40s star.

Although the film brings a clearcut finale rather than a vague puzzle, too many loose threads come together too neatly and rather than bringing the film to a satisfactory conclusion, it leaves you scratching your head, is this what I spent the last 2 hours waiting to hear? Overall, there is too much plot, too little character development and a wildly uneven tone. The movie has its moments but it's a blinding mess all together.