DVD Roundup: The Black Dahlia.

This movie had a lot of potential. A novel by one of my favorite writers, James Ellroy, adapted to the screen by a director, Brian DePalma, who shares some of Ellroy's animating preoccupations: voyeurism and sexual obsession.

Unfortunately, it's a monumental cock-up for a lot of reasons. Josh Harnett's inert lunkishness, plot elements that fail to cohere, Hillary Swank's Irish (?) accent, and DePalma ripping off scenes from his own movies are chief among them. Most annoyingly, it falls into the trap of attempting to ape film noir elements, from mis en scene to editing to acting styles, which makes it a cousin to Soderbergh's Good German. While it's an understandable approach, it undermines one of the central motifs of Ellroy's fiction: sleaze. Ellroy makes it his mission to give readers who may only know the 1940s and 50s from squeaky-clean films of the period a sense not only of the moral compromises of the era, but the physical squalor as well. Rubbing the reader's nose in filth highlights the depravity of his characters. DePalma's late-40s L.A., like Curtis Hanson's from L.A. Confidential, looks like you could eat out of the gutters. It's an understandable oversight, but it ends up limiting the film's ability to draw us into the obsessive mind of its protagonist. It doesn't help, of course, that said protagonist is played by Josh Harnett, who posesses the expressive range of an Olmec Indian stone head.* Score: 6.2

*A case of nerd-chow to the first person to identify the source of that reference.**

**Nerd-chow does not really exist.