The Black Dahlia is James Ellroy’s most famous novel, probably because of his personal investment in the story, to which he confessed in his memoir, My Dark Places. The murder of movie starlet Elizabeth “Betty” Short in 1947 (the year Ellroy was born) is the true-life basis for the tale; the extremely gruesome way in which she died must have made it feel as though Jack the Ripper had come to Los Angeles.
Outside of Ellroy’s fictionalisation, the murder remains unsolved — as does the murder of Ellroy’s own mother, also in LA, precisely a decade later, when he was a mere 10 years old. As Ellroy puts it in a new afterword to The Black Dahlia, his passionate interest in the death of Betty Short, and in writing about it, stood in for feelings about his mother that he could not admit to at the time.
In the book and now movie of The Black Dahlia, it is LA police detective Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) who represents Ellroy’s own obsession with dead Betty. To the detriment of the other cases he’s meant to be following up, he becomes fixated on her. His partner, Bucky (Josh Hartnett), and girlfriend, Kay (Scarlett Johansson), are puzzled by this, but then they have problems of their own in this almost insanely complicated plot.
Some of these complications arise from Ellroy’s depiction of the world of 1940s LA, with its robber-baron developers, corrupt constabulary and the unstable mix of glamour and exploitation that was (and is) Hollywood. This world, as portrayed by Ellroy, has already been filmed once before, in Curtis Hanson’s LA Confidential — a movie that handled its complex plot with skill and panache. But if Ellroy, and we moviegoers, were expecting something equally riveting from the movie of The Black Dahlia, we will be disappointed.
The director here is Brian DePalma, who, as I have noted before, has an almost unique ability to scramble a plot, introducing his own special kind of incoherence to anything he touches. Here, there is far too much going on for DePalma and scriptwriter Josh Friedman to handle, and it’s hard to get involved in the narrative when you’re not sure what’s happening or why. Several sub-plots start up and diverge before the central story gets under way, and then the various plots are juggled awkwardly for two hours before trying to resolve themselves in a trainÂsmash of flashbacks and voice-over — and one is still left confused.
This pretty much destroys The Black Dahlia as a movie, though it has some fine moments, especially in the interplay between the two cops, who are also boxing-ring rivals and, potentially, romantic rivals too. The object of their affections is Kay, except you can’t see quite what Johansson is doing in her role; she seems woefully under-directed, and has to rely heavily on a cigarette-holder to do her actorly business. At any rate, she’s blown off the screen by Hilary Swank’s pouting temptress of a rich girl who’s slumming it and may have had some connection to the murder victim.
But then Swank is herself all but swept away by Fiona Shaw playing her drunken mother. Shaw is so hilariously over-the-top that she makes the rest of the movie seem pallid — and exposes its total lack of any convincing realism. When the screeching drunk who has only a few minutes of screen-time is the most compelling thing in a movie, you should know there’s a problem.
And then there’s the look of the film. I imagine that what DePalma and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond were going for was a subtly sepia-toned look that would give the film the visual feel of its period, 60 years ago. Roman Polanksi did a similar thing in Chinatown, but used the sets, clothes and style to do it rather than simply grading his film stock to a uniform yellow-brown. In the case of The Black Dahlia, it doesn’t work at all; it just looks like it was all shot by an incompetent, or taped off TV on to a fuzzy old video tape.
Zsigmond is, of course, a great cinematographer, with many a masterpiece to his credit — including Robert Altman’s take on noir, The Long Goodbye. Unfortunately, The Black Dahlia is closer to Jack Nicholson’s limp Chinatown sequel, The Two Jakes, also shot by Zsigmond, than that movie. One can only assume that working with DePalma fuzzes the eye as well as the brain.