The Black Dahlia

Though Chicago or New York probably provide the setting for the majority of American noir films, it's really Los Angeles that best embodies the genre's essence. The nation's most glamorous metropolis, and it's youngest, L.A. would intuitively have the most seedy underbelly.

Roman Polanski's Chinatown, in many ways the ultimate L.A. noir, imagines a city famous for its grandiose lies that's built on even larger lies. No matter how devious the imagination of a filmmaker, there's always some true crime in the city's past, some barely-whispered scandal, that plumbs even further depths of humman suffering and cruelty.

Novelist James Ellroy, whose mother was murdered here long ago, has spent the better part of his career fictionalizing the outrageous crimes and shady dealings dotting the history of Los Angeles. The previous major adaptation of his work, Curtis Hanson's modern classic LA Confidential, took Ellroy's at times obsessive cataloguing of the LAPD police blotter and reworked it into an epic indictment of the ugliness behind the shiny, sunny exterior of the motion picture industry and the stars who fueled its image.

Such movies are built on a rather straightforward contradiction. The world sees Los Angeles as the Movie Capital, and thus ascribes to it all kinds of attractive and exciting qualities, but the truth is that this beauty was created through pain, greed, rape, addiction, perversity and murder. (For another terrific development of this idea, see Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which posits that even cartoons were built on a foundation of treachery and graft.)

One could almost argue that the glamour and the sleaze feed off one another - the grisly murder scenes, buried corpses and stolen wealth wouldn't seem as fascinating if they didn't involve showbiz types, and likewise the fast living, fame and money of Hollywood wouldn't be so exciting without partially-obscured mystery, scandal and danger.

Think Paris Hilton. Without her money, she'd just be another whore. Without her whorishness, she'd just be another dreary, bug-eyed rich girl.

Brian De Palma's latest Ellroy adaptation, the stylish and crafty Black Dahlia, departs from Hanson's birds-eye-view of corruption in the City of Angels to tell the L.A. story from a more personal angle. Rather than take in the full scope of '40s L.A., juxtaposing the poor immigrants who built the city with the moguls who run the studios, the hopeful starlets rushing out for screen tests with their unlucky counterparts undressing for johns in fetid motel rooms, De Palma uses the infamous Black Dahlia murder case to convey the experience of being a very small fish in the world's largest, scummiest pond.



Homicide detective Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) spends most of the film peering out of windows, grabbing quick glances around corners or peeking out from behind the steering wheels of parked cars. He and his partner, Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart), have been assigned the strange case of Elizabeth Short (Mia Kirshner), a wannabe actress found not just killed but hideously mutilated and disfigured.

This is a real unsolved murder case, and a rather fascinating one, but De Palma mainly uses it for background. The real focus remains on Bleichert himself, who begins the film finding happiness and friendship with his new partner (and one-time boxing rival) and his partner's wife, the fetching Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson). Several strange and unsettling events, some of them set in motion by the murder of the girl who comes to be known as The Black Dahlia (after a recent film, The Blue Dahlia), give Bleichert insight into the reality behind his friend's perfect marriage and his own cozy position within the police department.

Ellroy has constructed the story in much the same way as LA Confidential, using real crimes and investigations as a structure but keeping the emphasis on the personal experiences of LAPD detectives in the era. De Palma, accordingly, has gone to great lengths to get the period details correct. For the most part, he succeeds swimmingly. Dante Ferretti's sets evoke old Hollywood with remarkable luster. Everything's so manicured, so baroque, that it's unclear whether he means to recreate '40s Hollywood or a '40s Hollywood film. In the end, it hardly matters.

Mark Isham's score, though occasionally intrusive, ably mimics the overwrought, swelling anthems that highlighted old thrillers and melodramas. It's so on the nose, it caused some members of the audience to laugh at the obviousness of it all, but De Palma's clearly going for a traditional, old-fashioned Hollywood thing here, so such broad strokes can be forgiven.

Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography is similarly a mixed bag. The camera work on display here rivals just about any De Palma effort, including one terrific traffic shot early on depicting a clash between Zoot Suits, police and sailors and an incredible crane shot that scales a building before twisting around behind it and eventually coming back down to Earth where it all began. Remarkable.

One scene, in which the detectives and Kay watch The Man Who Laughs in a theater, uses extreme lighting under Johansson's face as a portentious warning, which is a trick De Palma has lifted directly from movies of the '40s and '50s. It's a great little moment. Less successful is some of the lighting on individual scenes. An attempt has been made on some interior shots to give the movie a brown, muted look, possibly trying to get the color film to mimic the monochrome of a dark scene in black and white. Instead, the effect tends to make the film look flat and washed out. Again, some moments work great. Johansson, with her curled blonde locks, cigarette holder and beet-red nail polish, looks lifted off the poster for some old B picture with a name like Man Eater or Heat City.

De Palma returns frequently to first-person shots, giving the audience Bleichert's perspective. In one audacious scene, his superior at 1 Police Plaza, Ellis Loew (Patrick Fischler) towers over the camera, screeching directly into the lens. Often, De Palma switches to Bleichert's perspective when he's in trouble - during a shootout, when he's being lectured and, in a brilliant sequence, as he's forced to engage with the wealthy, snooty Linscott family at a dinner party.

Capturing Bleichert's perspective seems to be the sole aim of the film, which is odd for a police procedural about a real-life murder case. The only way to examine the meaning behind Los Angeles, the real TRUTH about this town, is to see it from the perspective of a lowly, meaningless individual. It's such a tangled mass of corruption, it can't be seen from above, only from within.

De Palma and screenwriter Josh Friedman spend so much time with Bleichert, Blanchard and Kay, establishing their relationships and the painful secrets that threaten their bonds, the film gets pretty distracted from the Dahlia murder itself. Coming largely in the film's final 30 minutes, the actual investigation could have provided enough rich material for an entirely different film. As it is, some of the connections come off as rushed and underdeveloped.

Hillary Swank gives the best performance in the film as heiress Madeline Linscott, who met Short at an underground lesbian club. (The speakeasy-style dyke bar provides De Palma with an excuse to provide Black Dahlia with a '40s style musical interlude, in this case a magnificently strange performance featuring K.D. Lang and a variety of androgynous dancers. This is the exact kind of touch that make De Palma movies so much damn fun.) Swank is actually sexy in this role, and I've never said that about her in a movie before, and there's just so much fertile material in the Linscott storyline and Madeline herself, it's really too bad De Palma waits so long to work them into the film.

Likewise, the figure of Short herself remains totally enigmatic. Seen in screen test footage and an erotic short made before her untimely demise, Short displays a tight, wounded pride as well a manic streak. Sure, she's a pathological liar. She claims to do a variety of accents and then clams up when pressed to actually display her talent. She emotes constantly except when delivering actual dialogue. But this is Hollywood! Such realities don't matter. Only your look, your spirit, your essence really matters. Everything else can be faked.

Short preens in front of the camera at her screen test, making faces and reciting dialogue from Gone With the Wind, but only becomes interesting when she's not performing, in the moments between the performance when she's speaking genuinely. When she stops talking about the possibly fictional lover whom she lost in the war, and turns on the charm for her script reading, it's both a funny transition and a little tragedy.

The implication is made that simply living with this understanding - that no one cares about the real when the lie sounds better - has driven all of these characters insane. It certainly drives Blanchard to the edge, the fact that he can't solve any crime in which he hasn't been implicated. No one can live with hiding the truth any more, but blurting it out would be too dangerous, so the entire city tip-toes around one another at all times.

And these aren't just the big lies - the bundles of $100 bills buried beneath the sink or the rotting, shoddy wood slipped into the gleaming new housing project beneath the Hollywoodland sign - but the interpersonal, everyday kind as well. Bucky Bleichert isn't taking down Mickey Cohen, he's not blowing the lid off of some marquee idol who killed her father when he got a little grabby with her.

He's just looking into a murder, a slaying of an unknown girl who never meant anything to anybody. It's clear that he and Blanchard relate to Elizabeth Short, who came to Los Angeles dreaming of stardom and discovered a monstrous city that swallows people whole and doesn't even leave a pretty corpse so they can have an open casket funeral. That's not just this one pathetic girl or these few detectives whose lives have lost meaning. It's everybody in LA, both then and now. (Well, okay, everybody except ten guys in big offices somewhere).

In one of the movie's most dryly funny scenes, Rose McGowan plays a background extra, one of the lucky ones, who vaguely knew the late Ms. Short. She gives her interview dressed in her most recent costume, a ridiculous Egyptian girl number, and has to take off before Bleichert's through with her because her ride arrives. It's a dusty pick-up truck with 10 girls, all dressed identically, piled into the back. "The truck doesn't wait," the girl explains. And that's the Los Angeles of Black Dahlia. It's a horrible place, when all is said and done, but when it calls for you...well, you really have no choice but to answer.