The Black Dahlia
Brian de Palma
Initial release: September 15, 2006 (USA)
In January 1947, the body of one Elizabeth Short was discovered in a vacant lot in Los Angeles. She had been mutilated before and after her death. The case caused a sensation among the press and public; years before Zodiac, the Short killing seemed to set the tone for an American half-century of violence. The killer was never found; like Jack the Ripper, theories abound, some of them connecting the case to the Cleveland Torso Murders of the 1930s. And then there's James fucking Ellroy, a right-wing crank and longtime crime novelist who wrote a book based on the case that spat on her memory, and then dedicated it to his mother. And then Hollywood made a movie of it. I watched Brian de Palma's The Black Dahlia so you don't have to.
I feel bad for Brian de Palma, I do. He desperately wants to be one of the great filmmakers of Hollywood, but no matter how hard he tries, he can't reach the same level as Scorcese or Coppola or any of his New Hollywood peers. He tries gamely to recreate the success of L.A. Confidential, but he doesn't seem to grasp what, exactly, made that film work in the first place. The Black Dahlia is shot through with film references in a way so masturbatory it makes Quentin Tarantino look restrained.
And then there's Josh Hartnett; the man couldn't act his way out of a paper bag. While there's an argument that his later work is more successful, it's clear from movies like Halloween H20 and Pearl Harbor that you won't find any signs of that success prior to his tenure on Showtime's Penny Dreadful at the very earliest. In The Black Dahlia, he is so wooden even his scenes of anger are like watching a department store mannequin trying to emote.
And then there's Aaron Eckhart, who at this point in time was having a bit of a moment with roles in Thank You For Smoking and later on The Dark Knight; he rages and flails across the set, but his particular brand of unhinged is only believable if he's a particular two-faced prosecutor in a superhero movie.
Speaking of superhero movies... the film has tonal problems. The film's editing is a nightmare, with odd choices of dissolves and a dizzying sense of pacing. You could count the number of shots longer than ten seconds on one hand, probably. Most of the time, lighting is flat and unconvincing, far from the looks of the classic film noirs de Palma is clearly trying to imitate. A scene about midway through has Eckhart's character menaced by a hired goon and a mysterious figure with a knife slowly advancing upon him; the entire sequence feels like something out of the era immediately following the 1989 Tim Burton Batman film.
The Black Dahlia, like the novel it's based on, has little resemblance to reality. Ellroy cooked up some cockamamie story about illicit stag films and underground lesbian culture, and all of it survived into the film. Make no mistake, this is not a film that's particularly respectful of female queerness, with even the protagonist expressing his disgust over it. It can be jarring to see this in a film from 2006, but that's what we're given. The whole thing is low-key homophobic and high-key disrespectful to Short herself.
Apparently David Fincher was originally attached to do this film; he wound up doing Zodiac instead, which in retrospect was the wise choice. Elizabeth Short really deserves better than the kinds of stories her case has inspired, but like Jack the Ripper or really any famous unsolved murder case where the victims are women, you can expect the victims to never get their due, not really. Be it 1947, or 1888, or today, this is a world where victims are a prop at best for someone else's purposes. Respect never seems to come into it.