The trailer for "The Black Dahlia" refers to its subject as "the most notorious murder in California history." It's easy to understand why. On Jan. 15 ,1947, the mutilated body of a porn star named Becky Short was discovered just outside of Los Angeles. The corpse had been cut in half, its organs removed, and the mouth slashed open from ear to ear. The ensuing investigation and media circus lasted for several months, but the identity of the killer has remained a mystery to this day. Given the story's sensational mixture of salaciousness and sadism, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood turned its wandering eye to this sordid tale, and now here we have a fictionalized version of the event courtesy of "Scarface" director Brian De Palma.
De Palma's film fashions the Dahlia's story into a moody detective thriller, with less interest in the victim herself than the two cops driven to find her killer. The first is Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett), a rookie on the Force looking to prove himself with his first big case. One wonders why a guy with the first name Bucky would want to be in the headlines, but no matter -- his partner Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) is equally hungry for fame, eager to prove that he's still in the game after having made a name for himself years ago with a high-profile arrest.
When they're not chain-smoking or hunting for clues, Bucky and Lee manage to find the time for a love triangle with Lee's girlfriend Kay (Scarlett Johansson). As Lee's obsession with the case causes him to become increasingly unhinged, Kay turns to Bucky for support, leading to a couple of uninteresting revelations and one heavily edited sex scene. Wide-eyed and bland, Johansson lets her good looks and Grace Kelly wig do most of the acting for her. The result is dramatically ineffective, but so damn sexy that I almost didn't notice.
Ahem. As the investigation into the Black Dahlia murder continues, Bucky and Lee find themselves drawn into the seamy underbelly of Los Angeles, from sleazy lesbian nightclubs to exotic brothels to bloodstained shacks on the outskirts of town. Each time the pieces of the puzzle begin to fit together, a new twist in the case undoes everything, and slowly the depravity of the proceedings begins to corrode the two men's souls. Bucky grows gloomy and pensive, while Lee starts to lose his grip on reality, turning violent and unstable as he hunts obsessively for the killer. Eckhart plays Lee as a man unable to draw the line between duty and self-destruction -- his slow descent into madness is so compelling that it deserves a movie of its own.
It doesn't take long for the flailing strands of plot to get tangled up in an incomprehensible ball, but De Palma and his screenwriter Josh Friedman don't seem tremendously interested in coherent narrative. In lieu of a cohesive story, "The Black Dahlia" offers up a pulpy film-noir atmosphere straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel. The filmmakers have gone to excruciating pains to recreate the mood of a 1940s detective film, right down to the crimson lipstick at the end of Kay's ebony cigarette holder. The score is slow and jazzy, the color scheme faded to the edge of black-and-white, the dialogue so hard-boiled you could crack it with a hammer -- careful aesthetic decisions, made to recall an era when Hollywood was full of Maltese Falcons and fedoras were still in fashion. And yet, De Palma draws out the hypnotically sexual undertones of the genre to an extent that no director in the '40s ever could; the resulting blend of old-school style with new-age erotica is at times enticing, at times disturbing.
Given the meticulous attention to the overall tone of the film, it seems a shame that the whole enterprise gets spoiled by, of all things, the acting. I know Humphrey Bogart is long gone, but couldn't De Palma have found anybody more suited to fill his shoes than Josh Hartnett? A charming young actor who's proven more than tolerable in light comic fare ("40 Days and 40 Nights"), Hartnett seems suffocated by the gravity of this new material, and his mumbling voice-over hangs like a lead weight on the film's momentum.
Aware that he's out of his depth, Hartnett falls back on his trademark mannerisms, communicating vast depths of emotion by leaning forward and squinting thoughtfully -- it's a method, I suppose. In the scene when Bucky first views the Dahlia's mutilated corpse, Hartnett digs deep, scrunching his youthful features into an expression of chagrin that calls to mind an unhappy 10th grader regarding a poor report card. Then again, one wonders what Bucky has to be glum about, given that there are nearly half a dozen scenes in which he bursts through a door and starts tearing the clothes off of some eager young vixen. One of these conquests is named Madeline Linscott (Hilary Swank), a bisexual nymphomaniac whose wealthy family has a mysterious connection to the Dahlia case.
The decision to cast Hilary Swank in the role of Madeline deserves a moment of reflection. With two Oscars to her name, no one can accuse Swank of being a slouch in the acting department. It is not without reason, however, that she won those Oscars for playing a muscle-bound pugilist and a transvestite, respectively. Buried beneath the sultry trappings of a femme fatale, her accent a horrifying mixture of Scottish and Bryn Mawr grammar school, Swank meanders about the screen swiveling her non-existent hips and grasping hopelessly at a voluptuous allure that she simply fails to possess. As she and Hartnett stared blankly into each other's eyes while fumbling over the brilliant dialogue given them, I could feel the energy slowly begin to seep out of this once promising yarn.
By the time "The Black Dahlia" stumbled to its final twist, I was almost too exhausted by Bucky and Madeline's endless dallying to care that the resolution felt tacked on with a staple gun. When we finally do discover who killed Becky Short, the motivation makes no sense, the means seem implausible, and the character of the murderer feels written in for the sole purpose of providing dramatic closure to a mystery that strikes me as a lot more spooky when left unsolved. But ultimately, the real mystery is how could a film that initially seemed tight as a spring become so flaccid in just two hours' time? If they ever make another movie about the Black Dahlia, my suggestion is this: fire Hartnett and Swank, rewrite the ending, and make Scarlett Johansson's hairdo the main character.
