The Sophian

Issue date: 9/21/06 Section: Arts

Media Credit: movies.zap2it.com Aaron Eckhart and Scarlett Johansson star in The Black Dahlia.

This review must be prefaced by a sincere apology to those of you who so naively went and paid to see Brian De Palma's latest trial of greatness, The Black Dahlia, upon my suggestion in my fall movie preview. I, like everyone else, had extremely high hopes for the film, starring Josh Hartnett as a Los Angeles detective wrapped up in the notorious case of the Black Dahlia murder, Aaron Eckhart as his hot-headed partner and Scarlet Johansson as Eckhart's girlfriend, and directed by the same man who once gave us such masterpieces as Scarface and The Untouchables; but by the end of the movie I was left with some vague, poorly-pieced-together idea of what the movie was actually supposed to be.

The problem with a director making one or two good movies at the beginning of his career is that said director will never be able to crawl out from under the shadow of his previous masterpieces unless more outstanding films are produced. The director's work will always be compared to his prior work, which, in the best of cases, will create an iconic director who is in a constant state of competition with himself, resulting in good movie after good movie after good movie. In the worst cases, the director is either passed off as a flash in the pan and never amounts to anything, or he keeps trying to make something amazingly mind-blowing to prove that he is not such a fluke.

De Palma is somewhere between the first and third of those categories - among his peers, he's considered a highly talented individual who has created his own immediately recognizable style, sometimes producing good to great movies, like the aforementioned, or even the first Mission: Impossible installment and Casualties of War, equally pleasing to audiences and critics. But we must also not forget the schlock he's put out there, like Mission to Mars and Femme Fatale, which makes up a good portion of his oeuvre. Unfortunately, The Black Dahlia is another of his films to be added into the latter batch of mishaps.

The reason everyone is doting so much on the direction of this movie, and turning not a blind, but a decidedly-closed eye to the acting, is because it is almost painfully obvious that, throughout the entirety of this straw house of a film, De Palma is directing it in an effort to recreate the stylized, popular and yet slightly cheesy film noir pieces of the 1940s. Every shot is meticulously lit, every set, painstakingly decorated; but this, of course, is not at all the fault of the movie. In fact, as period pieces go, the sets, lighting, costumes and makeup don't really miss a thing.

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