Black Hearted

Shady character: Detective Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) ponders the murder of a Hollywood starlet in the Brian De Palma thriller The Black Dahlia. (Universal Pictures)

Elizabeth Short was a dreamy part-time waitress and aspiring actress who ended up in a vacant lot on the wrong side of Los Angeles, cut in half by a torturer who was never found. The year was 1947, and the press of the day, especially L.A.’s daily newspapers, took off with the story, nicknaming Short “the Black Dahlia,” a play on The Blue Dahlia, the title of a popular noir thriller starring Alan Ladd. The Black Dahlia slaying led to the O.J. trial of its era. The murder proved a curse to almost everyone involved; suspects typically ended their days in asylums or worse. In time, Short became the Woman Who Died for Hollywood’s Sins, a mysterious girl who inspired dozens of books and eventually websites, computer games, a water-colour series by rock star-artist Marilyn Manson and now, a plush, heavy-breathing crime drama starring Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson and Hilary Swank.

James Ellroy’s obsessive source novel, The Black Dahlia, suggests that detectives lost the better part of themselves in the mad-dog pursuit of Short’s tormentor. Brian De Palma’s film adaptation ransacks the first half of Ellroy’s book for colour without ever settling into a coherent police procedural. Bucky Bleichert (Hartnett) and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) are former boxers who joined the Los Angeles Police Department to escape the mob. The two eventually escape the drudgery of patrol work and are partnered up as detectives. When the gory jigsaw puzzle that is Short’s body is uncovered, they share a competitive obsession with finding the murderer — a hunt that threatens to overwhelm their relationship with the arty Kay Lake (Johansson), their mutual girlfriend.

At no time does the film turn into a satisfying mystery where the audience feels compelled to guess along with our racing detectives. The Black Dahlia isn’t so much a movie as a series of vivid, decadent showpieces. The film courts ridicule when Hartnett enters L.A.’s gay demimonde in search of a suspect. Whereas the lesbian bars in Ellroy’s crime novel were dingy hideaways, De Palma gives us a spacious, glittering nightclub. We see k.d. lang in a tuxedo, fronting a 15-piece band, belting out Cole Porter’s Love for Sale. Waves of nearly nude chorus girls descend to the stage, flicking their tongues at each other. Who knew that lesbian nightclubs were such a hotsy-totsy business back in the 1940s?

Very often, we have little or no interest in what De Palma shows us. Short’s autopsy becomes the setting for a joke. “Mind if I smoke?” a cop grunts. “She won’t mind,” the coroner snickers. Elsewhere, we see Short (played by Mia Kirshner) cast in a lesbian smut film, sobbing when her partner brandishes a barbed dildo. DePalma drops two characters from the top of a high staircase, following them with slow-motion pleasure as they splash across a marble floor. Many of the peripheral cops and criminals are grotesques. The most offensive is district attorney Ellis Loew (Patrick Fischler) — or “Jewboy,” as he is called here — a caricature that is as coarsely anti-Semitic as any sequence in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.

So wrong, but feels so right: Bleichert (Hartnett) takes an interest in socialite Madeleine Linscott (Hilary Swank) in The Black Dahlia. (Universal Pictures)

The main characters are treated more sympathetically, although Hartnett, Eckhart and Johansson are little more than babbling bystanders in De Palma’s twisted passion play. No one but Hilary Swank emerges from the dismal, cloying bouquet that is The Black Dahlia with reputation intact. Playing a seductive heiress who dresses in black and wears her hair like the departed Dahlia, Swank throws a jolt into a film otherwise devoid of pleasure. She alone has some fun play-acting in this picture, pawing and pulling at Hartnett in the front seat of her daddy’s car, trying to unravel the big lug like a housecat toying with a ball of twine.

Watching Swank slink across the screen, trailing plumes of cigarette smoke, the audience is lost for a few moments in a bona fide mystery; we’re reminded of Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep. When Swank departs, however, our enthusiasm evaporates. We are left once again alone with torture master De Palma and his squirming victims.

It’s hard to recall that director Curtis Hanson made an urgent, sexy drama out of similar material with Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential. (Both Ellroy novels are studies of troubled males who avenge abused women.) Hanson played on audience nostalgia for '50s noir with ingenuity and affection, offering a half-dozen character actors (including Kim Basinger, Russell Crowe, Kevin Spacey, Danny DeVito and James Cromwell) the roles of a lifetime. The Black Dahlia, on the other hand, is a misanthropic exercise that punishes almost all of its contributors, not to mention the audience.

The one figure that remains unscathed in De Palma’s malevolent spree is the Black Dahlia herself. The film reveals what are purportedly humiliating audition reels and porn films Short appeared in. But even here, De Palma can’t resist crafting the scenes with the cold elegance that characterizes his work. The Black Dahlia is never more than a figment of his lurid imagination. The filmmaker never touches the tragic soul that was Elizabeth Short.

The Black Dahlia is in theatres now.

Stephen Cole writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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