The Black Dahlia vs Brick

The next time someone says they don’t make movies like they used to, like it’s a bad thing, point them to The Black Dahlia. Trust me, after The Black Dahlia, you’ll be ready for Die Hard 4 and Transformers (which might be the best reason of all to skip The Black Dahlia altogether. Personally, I would rather not get ready for Die Hard 4 and Transformers.)

The Black Dahlia starts with a true story (the 1940s murder of would-be starlet Elizabeth Short), which was adapted into a book I didn’t read by James Elroy. It was then adapted further by hiring director Brian DePalma (whom I normally like, but who seems alternately blind to and crazy about camp, cheese and melodrama).

The Black Dahlia sounds like the sort of thing that would be right up my ally. It’s a modern take on noir, with wet city streets, dames, and crooked cops. I loved L.A. Confidential. The Black Dahlia is not L.A. Confidential.

Aaron Eckhart, even though The Black Dahlia is not L.A. Confidential, plays Russell Crowe. He’s a tough cop with a hot temper. Josh Hartnett plays Guy Pearce. I may have missed a detail, but I’m pretty sure these cops are supposed to be the same age, even though in real life Aaron Eckhart is roughly fifteen years older than Josh Hartnett, and Josh Hartnett looks roughly fifteen years old, period. They’ve got a couple Kim Basingers in Scarlett Johanssen and Hilary Swank. Eckhart and Hartnett are also boxers, named Fire and Ice. Johanssen is married to Eckhart, but flirts with Hartnett (by the way, Scarlett Johanssen’s character is either her age or…forty? I have no idea how old this character is supposed to be. Johanssen is beautiful, but is given a “look” and a “style”, and never seems to walk or talk or wear clothes. She “walks” and “talks” and WEARS COSTUMES.) I enjoy these actors, especially Eckhart, but this just isn’t their movie. The tone is all over the place (the movie seems to have roughly an hour edited out), which isn’t helped any by, say, Eckhart’s random hot temper, Hartnett’s hot/cold relationship with Johanssen, or the muddiness surrounding what’s supposedly the main plot of the movie: the murder of the Black Dahlia.

A girl was brutally murdered and found in the grass beside a street. She was a minor, struggling actress in Hollywood, and there are no immediate suspects. The investigation of the crime is amateur (if you’ve watched any episode of Law and Order to the first commercial, you’ll think of better questions to ask than these cops come up with), and leads to a host of alternatingly melodramatic and oblivious suspects. One, however, does make an impression: Madeleine Linscott, who has a great noir name, and is played by Hilary Swank. Madeleine is a bisexual prostitute having an affair with Hartnett, and who possibly had an affair with the Black Dahlia. Swank speaks in one of those crisp 1940s accents, and moves slowly through rooms so everybody can get a look at her costumes. I think she’s a lot of fun, and provided the only continuity in the movie. Of course Swank has obstacles as well. Her character is also obsessed with the Black Dahlia (whose name was Elizabeth Short), primarily because they looked just alike. They don’t. Elizabeth is played by Mia Kirshner, who looks nothing like Hilary Swank. Maybe Swank could have played both parts? Maybe they could have removed the line about them being identical? Also, Swank is given the absolute campiest, obscenely over-the-top movie family in recent memory. Wow. John Kavanagh and Fiona Shaw play Swank’s parents. They’re what you might call nuts. Remember when Steve Martin played Ruprecht in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels? These are the parents I imagine raising Ruprecht. I guess it’s supposed to remind me of the creepy relationship between Faye Dunaway and John Huston in Chinatown, but—all together now—The Black Dahlia is not Chinatown.

 Brick is another story. Brick actually comes close. You could watch Brick sandwiched between Chinatown and L.A. Confidential and not feel like you were slumming in the middle. I could ask you what you were doing, and you’d say “Not much. Just watching some awesome crime movies.”

Brick is a noirish tale (set in the present day) of dames, thugs, crime, murder and corruption of authority. And it’s set in a high school. The kids speak the language of gumshoes and gangsters, but with no apparent satire or winking. These kids live in an old movie, and this is how they talk.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is Brendan (Raise your hand if you saw him having the best post-3^rd Rock career. Hands down, liars.). His ex-girlfriend was murdered. He saw her earlier in the day, and received a mysterious phone call, but has no other clues. As he investigates, he runs into fairly monstrous teens (there is…another kind?), enigmatic women (including an actress who is appearing in every High School play ever), an overbearing police chief of a principal, and one seriously odd David Lynch villain played by Lucas Haas.

It works. Brick is just as stylized a mess as The Black Dahlia, but it gets the tone right from the start and doesn’t waver. Brick is true noir, because that’s really just a mood. You don’t need cigarette holders and fedoras. You just need the types, the crime and the shadows, all of which Brick has in (Sam) spades. Brick was written and directed by Rian Johnson. Of course there are overdone moments; some of the villainy is ludicrous, and some of the young dames don’t have the gravity necessary to deliver those lines (but you kind of have to be Faye Dunaway or Veronica Lake for that, so you know, tall order). The best thing about Brick in this double feature is that in Brick, any time you find something campy or artificial, you immediately acknowledge that it’s supposed to be that way, because that’s how these characters live. In Black Dahlia, you see something campy and automatically blame a director.

The Black Dahlia: D
Brick: B+