Interview. James Ellroy.

"After November of this year, I will never discuss the Black Dahlia murder case, Mr De Palma's movie, Mr Curtis Hanson's movie or my mother's murder again. I write big political books now, that's all I want to talk about." But it's still mid-September, and James Ellroy's still willing to talk with Hannah Eaves about which theory seems the likeliest key to the mystery of the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, an "ambitious and flawed" documentary about him and the case - and the moral system governing his work.

"Once De Palma's movie vanishes from theaters, Elizabeth Short, dead white woman par excellence, may find her tenure as a literary and artistic inspiration is finally coming to an end," suggests Seth Mnookin, who weighs the fruits of that inspiration in Slate. But The Black Dahlia's just arrived and the critics, for the most part, understandably can't help setting it for comparison next to Hanson's adaptation of LA Confidential or the other recently released LA story, Hollywoodland, or both.

Updated through 9/19.

Manohla Dargis, who wrote a book on LA Confidential, the film, for the BFI's Modern Classics series, writes in the New York Times that "De Palma has a flair for the frenzy of violence, specifically when visited on the female body... Blood runs through his work, but so does juicy life. In The Black Dahlia, though, that life has been drained from the filmmaking, much as the blood was drained from the victim's body."

Four out of four stars, though, from Keith Uhlich at Slant: "This is a fever dream vision of the City of Angels, the shared nightmare of its principal players whose every move, we realize in retrospect, is helplessly preordained."

Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical: "Brian De Palma arrives in the final third of 2006 with one of his best films, and yet no one will realize it for years to come."

"It's an ideal match of director, writer and subject, and The Black Dahlia has so many of the right moves, you wish the whole thing were better," sighs Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly.

Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix: "[O]nce the body turns up, the film turns into, well, a De Palma movie, with its narrative absurdities, its stylistic excesses, its hammy acting, and your uneasy sense that the whole thing might be a big joke."

"The sad thing about [The Black Dahlia and Hollywoodland] is that so much obvious talent, care and money were expended on results that are beautifully crafted but dramatically clotted and sometimes gratingly tedious," writes Godfrey Cheshire in the Independent Weekly. "The weird thing about them is that they are so similar. Like freak show twins, they could be wearing signs emblazoned 'Bastard Sons of LA Confidential!'"

Matt Zoller Seitz: "At first the film plays like Chinatown-style modern noir, in which the investigation of a singular horror reveals corruption within families, institutions and communities. But The Black Dahlia soon reveals itself as something more: the story of a young man discovering his moral code, then realizing how useless it is in the face of society-wide indifference, greed and cruelty."

Armond White, writing in the New York Press, also makes his LA Confidential and Hollywoodland references, but only to claim they "look like child's play" in comparison. Even so, "The Black Dahlia feels like a two-hour trailer featuring chopped-up highlights of De Palma's entire oeurve.... [M]uch of The Black Dahlia's disappointment owes to the triumph of DePalma's previous film, Femme Fatale (2002); it was the most exhilaratingly avant-garde mainstream movie of the new century (rivaled only by Mulholland Drive)."

The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw: "There is some gobsmackingly melodramatic thesping and the final revelations, when they eventually arrive, are at the wrong end of the bang-whimper continuum."

"With so much to wrap up in so little time, the film's central mystery - just who killed the Dahlia, and why - can only be presented in a form of half-assery, rushed to a conclusion that would ring hollow if it weren't so comical," adds Bradley Steinbacher, who talks with Ellroy for the Stranger.

"Ellroy's prose can be overheated, but it's also gripping, which is more than can be said for De Palma's film, which sits on the screen, mysteriously inert and uninvolving, no matter the amount of sound and fury," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat.

But the "film is full of De Palma's staple ingredients: wonderful camera lifts, body doubles, women dressed to kill, period pornography, and references to Hitchcock that will make film buffs squeal," writes James Christopher approvingly in the London Times.

The Telegraph's Tim Robey calls it "Brian De Palma's strongest since Carlito's Way and quite the best period noir since the (admittedly superior) LA Confidential. The sheer narrative muscle of that film isn't here, for sure, but it has its own virtues, and they're big ones."

Earlier: Venice reviews.

Update: "I could go on about the ratio of De Palma's fat to Ellroy's bone, but the hell with it. Let's hear what Ellroy thinks about Dahlia, LA, all of it..." The Reeler talks with Ellroy.

Updates, 9/16: AO Scott in the New York Times: "[O]ften the combativeness of Mr De Palma's committed admirers reveals more about the nature of cinephilic ardor than it does about the filmmaker himself. Rock stars have fans; opera singers have worshipers; but movie directors have partisans. Liking a given director's movies can feel like a matter of principle, not of taste; failing to appreciate them is therefore evidence of cretinism or, at best, a serious moral and intellectual deficiency." Further in: "No longer the playful postmodernist, he is now, in the eyes of his admirers, something of a classicist, his critical enemies not high-minded squares but soulless philistines."

Stephanie Zacharek in Salon: "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."

To its Black Dahlia special, the Los Angeles Times adds Carina Chocano's review:

• "[D]espite some amusing distractions, watching the big picture coalesce is not unlike watching someone complete a jigsaw puzzle. It all comes together eventually, but you already saw the image on the box."

• Larry Harnish's "Black Dahlia Primer."

• And Ellroy himself on "three incandescent minutes of Mia Kirshner as Elizabeth Short."

Jim Emerson: "By the end, lots of people are getting shot (in pretty unimaginative ways for De Palma), just so it seems the filmmaker can get the movie over with. Things fall apart. I didn't feel like De Palma cared about the movie anymore at this point, and so neither did I."

Michael Joshua Rowin at Stop Smiling: "Both J Hoberman and a friend/colleague have expressed disappointment that the film, to use Hoberman's words, 'rarely achieves the rhapsodic (let alone the delirious).' One can't dismiss that point, and it's even least among the film's flaws. And yet there's so much to admire in this gorgeous, ridiculous, irreverent, disturbing, incoherent mess of cinematic brilliance."

DK Holm notes "a mark of the difference between Curtis Hanson, who wants you to believe his films, and De Palma, who is essentially drawing a cartoon and thinking about the set pieces."

Daniel Kasman: "It is a revisionist neo-noir, which is not a redundant statement, for De Palma's film is undercutting pristine productions like LA Confidential by way of its own sloppy, inconsistent, and dissatisfying result, a hollow and hollowing film that seems to call the bluff of the attraction of everything it is - or at least tries to be, and fails - and its kind represents. These latter qualities are what make The Black Dahlia all the more interesting - its failings - because sometimes a troubled production and an awkward final product can leak fascination from all its odd holes, bulges, and depressions."

Pete Vonder Haar at Film Threat: "The Black Dahlia isn't a return to form for De Palma who, let's face it, hasn't had anything approaching 'form' for almost 20 years. It looks stylish, sure, but the script is laughable and the acting is ridiculous. If Hollywood decides to adapt Ellroy's American Tabloid, hopefully they'll coax Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland back to take the reins."

Mike D'Angelo at Nerve: "The Black Dahlia can't match the legendary ineptitude of Bonfire of the Vanities, but it's certainly not for lack of trying."

Online viewing tip. Karina Longworth's review for "Netscape at the Movies."

Updates, 9/18: Nick Davis: "Days later, you may find yourself revisiting this stunted and often foolish film with an almost haunted interest—exactly the sort of gravitational pull on both memory and conscience that the film means to describe, and which, despite being something of a mangled corpse itself, the movie powerfully recreates." The full review.

Richard Schickel in Time: "The Black Dahlia is tired when it is not self-parodying, and it suggests that our nostalgia for its genre tropes has become idle and a vacuous waste of our time and of our filmmakers' energies."

David Edelstein in New York: "A critic often has to play the role of coroner, dissecting a work to find out why it died (or never lived), but I'm frankly stumped by the Brian De Palma thriller The Black Dahlia; I can't tell you how it ended up such a stiff."

Updates, 9/19: C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark: "The Black Dahlia is a far from flawless film, but as a whole, significantly greater than its dismembered parts. I was thrilled, chilled, and, ultimately, moved."

Online listening tip. Slate's "Spoiler Special."

Posted by dwhudson at September 15, 2006 2:23 AM