Loved to Death: The Black Dahlia (2006)
Brian De Palma’s incomprehensible adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel looks pretty but makes a mess of the story.
True crime has always fascinated us. Safe at home, we can plumb the depths of human depravity, as if knowing how evil the world can get will somehow allow us to protect ourselves better. When Elizabeth Short was found dead on January 15, 1947, the murder took up more newspaper space than the Holocaust. Whether it was the aspiring starlet’s ties to Hollywood or the gruesome condition of her body (she was found literally cut in half, with a Joker smile carved on her face), America was obssessed with “The Black Dahlia,” the name given to her by crime reporters who were referencing a current Veronica Lake noir film The Blue Dahlia. Though the crime remains unsolved, James Ellroy, whose own mother was murdered when he was ten, fictionalized the crime in his 1987 novel The Black Dahlia. The tour-de-force novel of Hollywood sleaze and brutal crime was ripe for an adaptation, but Brian de Palma’s 2006 movie only gets the surface right.
The Story
Detective Dwight “Bucky” Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and his partner Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) meet in the boxing ring and are on another case when they are assigned to investigate the murder of actress Elizabeth “Betty” Short (Mia Kirschner). Both men become obsessed with the dead girl; Lee starts taking Benzadrine to work the case harder and Bucky becomes infatuated with Madeline Linscott (Hillary Swank) a rich playgirl who’s a dead ringer for Betty Short. When Lee is killed by an unseen assassin, Bucky begins an affair with Lee’s girlfriend Kay (Scarlett Johanssen) but becomes ensnared by Betty’s life of dark secrets, including prostitution and pornography. Bucky soon realizes that the Linscott family are somehow involved in the crime, and must find a way to solve the case without becoming consumed by his obsession.
The Adaptation
James Ellroy’s hard-boiled writing and tough-guy dialogue brings to mind Golden Agent noir writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, whose prose rang true even if it didn’t resemble how real people talked. Himself familiar with the seediness underneath Hollywood’s glamorous veneer Ellroy was always fascinated with Short’s murder, seeing it as parallel to the death of his own mother. The Black Dahlia is the first of the four books in his “L.A. Quartet,” that fused fiction with real life crime in 1940’s and 1950’s Los Angeles. The Black Dahlia is written with Bucky narrating in first person, which personalizes the obsession that permeated not only Los Angeles, but true crime enthusiasts and movie fans all over the country. Though the tough-guy style can get repetitive, the novel’s power come in its willingness to reveal lurid and ugly details without revelling in it. For Ellroy, the murder of Elizabeth Short is the culmination (or perhaps the nadir) of a society rife with violence and misogyny. It’s ironic, therefore, that Ellroy, like many noir writers makes his male characters are far more complex than his female ones, (who are often fetishized and grouped into the usual Madonna/Whore categories). Nonetheless, it’s a riveting read.
DePalma directed many thrillers (Obsession (1976), Dressed to Kill (1980) and Raising Cain (1992), among others) and seemed like he would perfect to direct the adaptation. And for once, DePalma reined in his usual distracting visual gimmicks and oversaturated colors to create a lushly stylish Los Angeles that brings the late 1940’s to life. There’s no question it’s gorgeous movie — perhaps too gorgeous as even the seedy porn film and dark back alleys are beautifully lit and shot. DePalma often paid homage to great directors with his work (Hitchcock being the most common), but The Black Dahlia is as clean and artificial as the world depicted in a classic black and white movie: everyone dresses too fashionably, enunciates too well and poses too perfectly to be real.
De Palma’s original version of the film was over three hours, as he tried to incorporate all of Ellroy’s tangled plots. However, the studio’s demand for a shorter film resulted in slapdash editing that leaves the audience hanging while it tries to figure out the ending. Lee seems to get obsessed and volatile overnight, and while Mia Kirschner is riveting as Elizabeth Short (but shown only in flashbacks in her audition reels) the film never really delves into why her murder captivated so much of America. Josh Hartnett is particularly miscast as Bucky. Ellroy’s characters often live in moral gray areas, but Hartnett portrays Bucky as stalwart and heroic urban cowboy, rather than a conflicted man drawn into the darkness while struggling to retain his humanity. Hilary Swank (who bears no resemblance to Mia Kirschner at all) is miscast and overly dramatic in her performance; she could be channelling Joan Crawford with her gestures and yet never convinces us of her own depravity or her seductive powers. Scarlett Johansson is luminous in an old-Hollywood way, but cast as the “good girlfriend,” she has little to do but chase after Bucky and offer him the traditional salvation of conventional romance.
The movie, if anything, needed a script that, rathet than trying to include every last detail of the book, instead tried to show how the twin forces of glamour and violence trapped all the characters and their choices. But DePalma’s screenplay tries to cram every last detail into the story and portray the scenes as dramatically as possible. The murderer of Elizabeth Short is the same in the movie as in the book, but while it’s a good thing that DePalma chose not to emphasize the gore and the violence (which would likely have turned the film into a horror movie) it’s empty as the psychology is missing. The characters remain two dimensional, with their core virtues and vices unexplored so that we have little insight into why they act the way they do. What do Lee and Bucky see in the Black Dahlia? A woman they might have loved or a movie star they might have worshpped ? The victim of a madman or a fallen angel who justifies their poor opinion of women? It’s never clear. Instead, the story tritely tries to make the case that a dead woman, however ordinary, is more dangerous to men than a live one. It doesn’t succeed, so that when Bucky finally solves the case and returns to his girlfriend, it’s doesn’t feel that triumphant. Misogyny is a common problem with noir, but DePalma’s lifeless adaptation, in trying to be completely faithful to its source, fails to reveal why Elizabeth Short or her murder obsessed America. Instead, it presents us with a convoluted mystery that, despite the inevitable melodrama, doesn’t even have a satisfying payoff. The Black Dahlia is one of the many adaptations that failed from the screenplay — but DePalma must be blamed making a true crime totally unbelievable.
