The Black Dahlia
Brian De Palma delivers his usual complement of sordid sex and stylized ultraviolence in “The Black Dahlia,” but without the passion and lucidity that characterize his best work. The material seems perfect for the underappreciated auteur of “Blow Out” and “Dressed to Kill”: the bizarre and horrific slaying of aspiring actress Elizabeth Short in 1947 Hollywood. De Palma breezes through some of his favorite themes: doppelgangers, mutilation and obsessions that drive decent men to ruin. But he gets bogged down by a script that can’t streamline its convoluted source material – James Ellroy’s speculative novel. Ellroy clearly wasn’t writing for a movie audience when he decided to give nearly identical last names – Bleichert and Blanchard – to the two cops investigating the Dahlia case. The detectives, played by Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart, are former boxers who return to the ring to slug each other in a publicity stunt that earns them plum assignments on the LAPD’s warrant task force. None of this backstory is relevant to Short’s murder, but De Palma dutifully plows through it anyway – aided by a pedestrian voice-over from Hartnett. For all I know, Ellroy’s novel had a Dickensian richness of detail, but it makes for an overstuffed movie. De Palma is a master of sophisticated genre films: lurid, ironic, visually daring thrillers that add up to more than the sum of their parts. “The Black Dahlia” has so many parts it would require advanced calculus to put them together.
LISTEN: The Black Dahlia