"The Black Dahlia"

Brian De Palma fails to breathe life into James Ellroy's tale of a notoriously grisly murder.

By Stephanie Zacharek

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Photo: Universal Pictures

Hilary Swank and Josh Hartnett in "The Black Dahlia."

Sept. 15, 2006 | The marrow-and-bone elegance of hard-boiled fiction -- the kind of prose left behind by the likes of Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain -- is determined not by how many words a writer can pack in, but by how few he needs. To see how James Ellroy, supposedly a master of modern hard-boiled fiction, stands up to the true masters, try this simple test: Look at your bookshelf and see how much space any three novels by Cain or Chandler take up. Now try the same with any three books by Ellroy.

Fatter, aren't they?

Ellroy is the kind of writer who uses 30 words when eight would do, and still falls down on the job when it comes to descriptive writing. In one sentence he'll introduce a character as a "slatternly woman" and, a few paragraphs down, refer to her as a "slattern": Instead of giving us the picture with a few well-chosen words on her housedress, her hair, perhaps the misapplication of her lipstick (as Cain would have), he goes for the cheap shorthand, as if to free up more words to squander elsewhere.

But because a good filmmaker, let alone a great one, can often tease poetry out of a bad book, there was reason to hope that Brian De Palma could work wonders with "The Black Dahlia," his adaptation of Ellroy's 1987 novel. It gives me no pleasure to say that "The Black Dahlia" is a listless, surprisingly dispassionate picture: With the exception of a few scenes, there's something glassy and glazed about it. De Palma is, as always, attuned to craftsmanship -- this isn't a carelessly made movie, and the editing, by De Palma's longtime associate Bill Pankow, is characteristically crisp. But the picture never gets past a surface reading of the tragedy at the heart of the Black Dahlia murder case: The mystery of the lost girl who couldn't be saved should have been a natural for De Palma, but in only a few sequences does he allow himself to get close enough to touch it. Mostly, the picture is curiously detached. It's stylish in the De Palma mode, but not nearly as resonant as those of us who love him hoped it would be.

"The Black Dahlia" -- both book and movie -- is a work of fiction with a very real, and very famous, Hollywood murder case at its core: In 1947, the body of Elizabeth Short, a 22-year-old Massachusetts woman with a taste for men in uniform and a tendency to concoct elaborate fantasies about her love life, was found in a weedy empty lot. Her body had been bisected at the waist, disemboweled and drained of blood. Short had been beaten and tortured before her death, and her mouth had been slashed ear-to-ear into a ghoulish approximation of a grin.

In real life, Short's killer was never found, although Ellroy concocts an elaborate solution for the case (one that, incidentally, De Palma and screenwriter Josh Friedman fiddle with considerably). "The Black Dahlia" tells the story of the murdered woman, in spectral, ragged fragments, as it's seen through the eyes of two detectives investigating the case, the relatively green Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and the considerably more seasoned Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart, an interesting actor who comes off as surprisingly inert here). The two men become obsessed with the case (even though De Palma never quite clarifies the roots of Lee's obsession, in particular), trying to unravel the elusive threads of Elizabeth Short's last few days and weeks. Together and separately Lee and Bucky follow Elizabeth's trail from a lesbian nightclub she occasionally frequented, mostly to score free drinks (this occasions the movie's wittiest scene, featuring an elaborate floor show with k.d. lang as a tuxedo'ed crooner flanked by a chorus line of haughty, topless lovelies) to a bungalow she shared with other girls who, as she was, were hoping to break into movies. (The luscious Rose McGowan appears briefly as an ambitious movie extra kitted up in a dazzling Egyptian slave-girl costume.)

Even as their hunt for Short's killer brings them together, Lee and Bucky happen to be in love with the same (live) woman, platinum bombshell Kay Lake (an uncharacteristically stiff but dependably luminous Scarlett Johansson). And Bucky, in the course of unraveling the mystery, drifts into the clutches of rich-girl femme fatale Madeleine Linscott (Hilary Swank, in a mannered performance that's like a smudge on the screen). In one very strangely directed scene -- I wasn't sure if it was supposed to get the kind of laughs it drew at the screening I attended -- Bucky finds himself trapped at a Linscott family dinner presided over by Madeleine's eccentric captain-of-industry father (John Kavanagh) and her freakishly unbalanced mother (Fiona Shaw, a wonderful actress whose performance here is misguided and badly shaped).

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