So once or twice (or three times, I guess), I’ve had a little something to say about The Black Dahlia which opens a week from this Friday and my enormous amounts of both anticipation and dread for its arrival: I hope it will be amazing; I fear that it will suck.
I don’t need to repeat all my reasons for these hopes and fears; I’ve explained them before. But now, last week at the opening night of the Venice Film Festival, The Black Dahlia was unveiled, and that means the first reviews started appearing. Both major trades have stated their feelings, and while I don’t always agree with Variety’s Todd McCarthy and I will certainly withhold judgment until I’ve seen the film myself, what he writes in his review is, sadly, exactly the film I’ve been expecting: an attempt at noir from a former master who puts all his effort into a few set pieces, lets the story fall apart near the end and, most importantly, is ruined by a lead actor who doesn’t have the emotional depth and talent to carry a film and story of this magnitude on his shoulders.
Now, on the other hand, Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter seemed to like Brian De Palma’s work much more, and on a few points, his impressions contradict McCarthy’s. Of course, if you only read the first graf of his review, they actually don’t sound so different as Honeycutt mentions that near the end, “Disappointingly, the film edges dangerously close to camp.” He goes on to say the film doesn’t actually do this, and splits furthest from McCarthy’s comments when he writes, “Hartnett delivers an intriguing mix of tenderness, self-righteousness and self-incrimination.”
McCarthy, on the other hand, writes, “Hartnett is too blank and expressionless to carry the picture; he narrates and is almost constantly on view, but offers little nuance or depth.”
Now come on: I know I haven’t seen it yet, and maybe Josh Hartnett will surprise the crap out of me, but based on everything else you’ve ever seen him in, I ask you: Which of these two comments seems more believable? That he offers “little nuance or depth”? Or that he “delivers an intriguing mix” of anything? Hartnett is a less talented Keanu Reeves (who can at least play expressionless, personality-less, action-oriented, one-dimensional characters very well: see The Matrix and Speed), and a slightly more-talented Paul Walker, but that is faint praise if I’ve ever given it.
I still haven’t read the screenplay, so I know nothing of Josh Friedman’s adaptation. I’m also just now rereading the book which I haven’t revisited in close to a decade. But if I’m certain about anything and if I’ve repeated anything over the nearly two years since this film finally was announced and started moving forward, the role of Bucky Blanchert is one that takes a tremendous amount of internal expression. It’s all emotion and obsession, much of it expressed through narration in the book (and apparently in the film too), and the entire story rests on this one character more than any other being able to successfully dramatize the conflict going on within him. De Palma has been many things as a director, but an actor’s director has never really been one of them. Oh, he’s had tremendous performances in his films, but he’s yet to take a mediocre talent and make him/her shine. I’ll be shocked if he managed to do it here with Hartnett, and if McCartney is too be believed, he hasn’t.
I guess we’ll see for ourselves next week.
Out of Focus 