The Black Daliah

The Black Daliah
Depalma, 2006



The trailer for DePalma's “The Black Dahlia” really impressed me – it impressed everyone. It was slick, perfectly paced, made excellent use of music and images, lured you into the mystery of Mrs. Shorts’ death, and most importantly made you want to get up and see the movie right away. It looked like The Black Daliah was going to be the neo-noir to see this year. It’s unfortunate that the film itself didn’t turn out anything like the trailer made it out to be. The actual film is a narrative mess of pointless plots that have nothing to do with the Black Dahlia murder that drags on for what seems to be three hours. It is admittedly pretty to look at and has decent performances, but it just didn’t have any draw or focus to keep the audience even mildly interested. In fact, I’m not even sure if half the people in my theater had any idea what was going on by time the credits – finally – rolled, as “The Black Daliah” basically dumps an entire runtime worth of information in the final ten minutes.

First of all, for a movie called “The Black Dahlia”, whose trailer entirely focused on the Black Dahlia murder, it was confusing to find out that much of the first half of the movie had almost nothing to do with the murder at all. The first act is the worst offender, as it basically is an extended pay-per-view preview of a boxing match; in this case one between a ‘Mr. Fire’ and ‘Mr. Ice’, who also happen to be the two main cops in this movie. For the longest time “The Black Dahlia” wanders aimlessly around, not really knowing when to get start with the actual story. I realize that you can’t criticize a film for being different than a trailer portrayed it to be, but that’s not what I’m doing. Even completely disregarding the notion that the movie didn’t live up or follow the trailer, it still just didn’t work. It needed to focus on something, which it didn’t, and more specifically it needed to focus on the actual murder and investigation of the death of Ms. Short, instead of wandering aimlessly around. The plot and pace pick up to a reasonable degree half way through, but it still isn’t effective enough and the damage is by then irreversible. By this point, the boat is sinking and there is nothing you can do but hold on until the bitter end.

On the plus side, “The Black Daliah” is a good looking film, but it’s a DePalma so that is almost a given. The cinematography is very stylish and highly polished, and the sets and costumes really make you feel like you are in a glorified neo noir world. The performances from everyone where also well done. Mind you, the only great performance was from Mia Kirshner, who plays Ms. Short, but everyone else does well with what little they have to work with – even Josh Hartnett! To give DePalma at least a little credit I should also note that I did see flashes of brilliance in “The Black Daliah”. I really loved the action sequence just before the discovery of the Daliah’s body, and the entire staircase sequence was breathtaking and was composed of a delightful combination of beautiful cinematograph, tense, thundering music and sly editing. It was frustrating watching these great scenes because they were brief glimpses into what the film could have, but unfortunately didn’t, become.

The final straw was the end of the film, which relies entirely on exposition or explanation after-the-fact to resolve the film. Without giving anything away, I’ll just say “The Black Daliah” packs an entire movie’s worth of information, clues and even scenes into a densely packed ten minute period. It was almost sickening because I couldn’t understand why they didn’t make all of that the film. Although, everything revealed at the end was pretty stupid unto itself, so I don’t know if watching that would have been any better. By the time the movie finally ended, I thought we had been there for three hours. But looking at my phone, I saw it had only been two.

There defiantly was potential in “The Black Daliah”, but the movie basically threw it all away in favour of…what? Nothing. The end result was meandering mess of a script and movie - albeit a fancy looking one with decent performances. But any goodness the movie had was immediately rendered irrelevant once the ridiculous “ending” (read: entire plot of the movie condensed into ten minutes) reared it’s ugly head. There were hints at brilliance and I felt as if the makings of a great film where there, but the narrative structure just completely ruined it all. As I walked out of the theater I couldn’t help but feel like I had just witnessed an really compelling idea for a movie get smoked by a bus, only to have DePalama run out into the middle of street and scrape the remains off the road to use them for his movie.