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The Black Dahlia

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The Black Dahlia (2006) had everything going for it, but it turned out pathetic. This is supposed to be the story of the murder of Elizabeth Short in Hollywood in the 1940s, but the film doesn’t get to Elizabeth or her murder until half an hour into the film. That is a bad sign. Instead it sets up the subplot, the relationship between two detectives. Well, that is an overstatement. It really just shows the two ex-boxers beating each other up in a corrupt bid for promotion. Then trying to solve the murder generates little suspense. Instead of suspense, the film delivers one plot twist after another, providing no foreshadowing for even the most astute viewer. When the murder is finally solved, it resolves nothing. And then there are more plot twists as one cop figures out the bizarre truth about his corrupt partner’s death. A poor screenplay and poor direction make this an interminable two hours.

Jim Bell

Posted Sunday, March 18, 2007 11:05 PM by JimBell | with 1 comments

Stranger than Fiction

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Under discussion:

Stranger Than Fiction (2006)

Stranger than Fiction (2006) is a movie well worth seeing. But, at the same time, it is a movie that makes me wonder, “Why isn’t it even better?” It is important to summarize the plot in a nutshell because this will give us a touch stone to prevent misinterpreting the movie (as has happened!). A dull guy suddenly hears a voice in his head narrating his life. He is in a tragedy and will die. He must make the most of his life before he dies and, at the same time, try to find out who is narrating his death sentence and get her to change it. The movie has first-rate acting. Will Ferrell plays the lonely, boring IRS agent, Harold Crick, with wonderfully appropriate body language and a quiet integrity. (He was nominated for a Golden Globe.) Maggie Gyllenhaal lights up the screen as a saucy, counter-culture baker, the tattooed wonder who Harold falls in love with. Dustin Hoffman has a less challenging role, but plays the drool, crusty English literature professor to well, throwing away great lines. Emma Thompson, who has had writer’s block herself more than once, is powerful as author Kay Eiffel, who, after 10 years in her isolated tower, cannot decide how to kill off the character in her masterpiece. As enjoyable as the movie is, why isn’t the movie better? The movie leaves itself open to a lot of illegitimate criticism. First, because Will Ferrell, a famous comedian, plays the protagonist, people expect him to be funny, but he is dead serious. Similarly, the movie is talked about as a comedy, but, while you may smile often, you won’t laugh. Furthermore, a demi-god called Charlie Kaufman wrote a brilliant, untouchable screenplay not so long ago, and Stranger than Fiction is like Kaufman-lite—or so the thinking goes. By this line of reasoning, if someone made a western with a shoot-out on main street, no one else could do it without being disappointingly derivative. Then there is the problem of plausibility. In any imaginative work such as science fiction, we are asked to grant an unlikely premise, for example, there are Martians. We have become used to doing this for genres like sci-fi. But Stranger than Fiction is so much like ordinary life that we see people waiting at the bus stop—and then we are supposed to believe that this guy hears a woman narrating his life? Of course, but some viewers find it hard to make the leap. This can lead to confusion, such as the on-line film critic who panned the movie because it did not explain how a fiction writer was able to narrate inside a real person’s head. But there are also perfectly sound reasons why Stranger than Fiction is not a classic movie. First, although good comes of the Harold Crick character being so extremely boring and anal retentive—if there is hope for him, there is hope for us!—his starched collar behaviour makes it highly unlikely that he and a tattooed radical will fall in love. Second, although Emma Thompson does a marvellous job of portraying a tortured, brilliant writer, what Kay Eiffel has written is ordinary. How is the story of a dull IRS accountant and his wrist watch great literature? We don’t find out. Third, the movie has a secondary theme which is important to the enjoyment of the movie but is quite esoteric. The major theme, as Amy Biancolli of the Houston Chronicle says, is “softly wrought reflections on the self-made life.” Harold is going to die soon (!) and must start to live his life like a comedy instead of a tragedy. (We, who assume we’ll die in the distant future, can just drift along . . . .) But the secondary theme is about the importance of fiction. To Kay Eiffel it is all-important, it can make her neurotic, destroy her health—it is all worthwhile if the novel is good. But to many viewers, the opposite answer is self-evident: a novel isn’t a big deal. English literature majors think it is a big deal, and they will love the crass condensations of Professor Jules Hilbert. For example, while books have been written about, and careers built upon, the study of tragedy or comedy, Prof. Hilbert summarizes for Harold: “Tragedy, you die; comedy, you get hitched.” Yet, at the climax of the movie, Prof. Hilbert is deadly serious. He says that Eiffel should keep her original ending because it will mean a great novel and merely one dead person. Her new ending will mean an average novel and a person’s life. To him and fanatics of literature, the answer is clear; but to the general movie viewer, the answer is probably clearly the opposite. Thus the secondary theme loses a lot of its impact. Finally, even though I applaud the ending, the way it is presented does not work very well. It is sudden. Although the conversation between the professor and the author warns viewers that the ending will be different, we don’t know what the original ending was, and we don’t have many hints about what the new ending will be. It is difficult to follow. You’re thinking why is there suddenly all this talk about the small things in life being crucial? How does that relate to the rest of the movie? If there is a connection, I thought, I could figure it out by rewatching the ending in the morning. I didn’t rewatch: I should be able to get it the first time. To make matters worse, the entire mode of presentation changes in the concluding segment of the movie. Suddenly, the narrator leaps to the fore and starts reading her novel to us! Heart-warming scenes float by on the screen. It all seems so preachy.

Director Marc Forster got four major nominations for directing a previous film, Finding Neverland, so he is a director of some talent. And first-time screenwriter Zach Helm was nominated for three major screenwriting awards for Stranger than Fiction. Yet a couple of interventions by the director and a couple of changes by the writer would have produced a significantly better picture.

Jim Bell

Posted Sunday, March 18, 2007 12:04 AM by JimBell | with 0 comments

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