Bravura film-making, and closer to Ellroy than the filmed LA Confidential

James Ellroy is writer whose outlandish and distinctly American imagination is feverish and extreme to the point of seeming borderline psychotic. His page-turners, among which The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential rate highest, are impossible to believe – or put down. Ellroy’s hophead staccato prose is as distinctive as William Burroughs’. His Hollywood quartet – Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential, and White Jazz – were all bestsellers when they came out in the late Eighties and early Nineties – times desperate for the taste of eccentricity they provide. Ultimately their best appeal is to edgy young men looking for something sleazy and exciting.

The James Ellroy world is so lurid it glares off the page at you, screaming and panting. The Ellroy plots are amazing, chaotic disaster areas whose disturbing and paradoxical sense of inner order is provided by the omnipresence of the author’s obsessively unquiet mind, his fascination with evil and violence and desire to track them down. He knows things, and he is going to tell us them, but he deals in curses, dark secrets, concealment, plotting, and it takes time to unearth it all. The narratives are screwed up tight, and they unwind with such increasing energy that the finales are inevitably apocalyptic, as viewers of Curtis Hanson’s 1997 LA Confidential cannot easily forget.

There’s no ignoring the autobiographical elements in all this. We know Ellroy had reason to be unbalanced early on – and gave every evidence of being so. His mother was raped and murdered when he was ten. The murder was not solved. He became a petty criminal, an addict, and was frequently homeless. Then he settled down and became a writer. His books can be seen biographically as an expiation, a debriefing, a momentary stay against confusion, but you won’t find ultimate tranquility in them. They’re drenched, the two ones we’re talking about, in the tacky grandeur of early Hollywood and the free ranging exploitation, the crime and graft, that accompanied Hollywood’s and Los Angeles’ rapid rise into a great city and great center of wealth and dream-making – the same secretive power-grabbing that underpins Robert Towne’s brilliant screenplay for Polanski’s 1974 Chinatown, the ultimate LA period noir by which all others must be judged.

Ellroy’s Hollywood crime stories are inherently cinematic, but like many novels that seem “ideal” for film, they’re a huge challenge to do. Their complexity is in the intensity of his relationship with them, none more than with The Black Dahlia, which focuses on the horrible murder of a would-be starlet, Elizabeth “Betty” Short, a notorious unsolved crime that obviously parallels for him the murder of Ellroy’s own mother. Ellroy may partly be the writer of lurid potboilers and his telegraphic style may be borderline illiterate. On the other hand, everything comes into play: the bonds of deep friendship, the nature of work, the edges of a new culture, politics, law, parenthood, the family. This is not a timid man. He takes on the world.

We had LA Confidential, and now we have The Black Dahlia. It’s inevitable to compare the two movies.

LA Confidential worked, and was rewarded with many Oscars in its year. But De Palma’s Black Dahlia works too, in ways that may be truer to their source. Curtis Hanson is more the humble craftsman; Brian De Palma, though his stock has long fallen, is more the famous auteur. Hansen may have produced the better movie aided by an incisive screenplay adaptation by Brian Helgeland and an impressive cast, but De Palma has given us a bigger slice of the Ellroy worldview by not slashing and burning the way Brian Helgeland (most ably) cut down LA Confidential to a size that could be made into a movie. Black Dahlia is a different kind of adaptation – not as dramatic a pruning job, and most of the plot elements are there.

That doesn't mean they're comprehensible, but you're hard put to it to follow Ellroy's plots in the books either. I don't agree that this adaptation makes the Ellroy plot harder to follow than Hanson/Helgeland's. In fact it's crystal clear most of the way through. What's lacking is all the background on the two cops, paired off in a boxing match used to promote a city bill for the police department as "Fire" and "Ice," Sgt. Leland "Lee" Blanchard (Aaron Ekhart) and Ofcr. Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert (Josh Hartnett). While the novel sees the men as sharply contrasted as their fight billing makes them, in Ellroy's world tainted honor and ambiguity are always undermining the lurid moral certainties, and so is the way the two men are linked by the same woman, Kay Lake (Scarlett Johannson). It's true that Johansson and Hartnett, as some reviewers have already said, are not great actors, or do not shine when as underdirected as they may be here. But this is a movie, and they both look wonderful in every scene. Johannson evokes the Forties and earlier movie stars. Hartnett has some of the screen charisma and looks of Cooper, Grant, Jimmy Stewart, or others of that time when matinée idols existed, when they did not do but were. True, Mia Kirshner's Betty Short (seen in a black and white screen test and a lesbian period porn flick) and Hilary Swank's twisted rich girl Madeleine Linscott are memorable performances, but this doesn't mean Hartnett's and Johansson's are throwaways.

The Black Dahlia may be better than you’d expect it to be but I’m not sure it all comes together. One critic has said it’s more like a pastiche of best moments from De Palma’s earlier films. It does evoke both Carlito’s Way and The Intouchables, to name two. There are plenty of moments when De Palma’s bravura, the way he revels in the cinematic, in atmospheric tracking shots, stunning falls and demolitions and gunfights and glamorous close-ups, is just such a deep pleasure to watch you don’t care if the movie is working or not. It isn’t up to De Palms’s best, and it never captures a mood and a character as Allan Coulter's recent Hollywoodland does, but it’s not a movie I’d want to have missed.

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James Ellroy writes in homage to his mother's memory and in praise of Josh Hartnett's Bucky ("Hartnett’s performance nails Bucky with no histrionic excess").

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.