The Black Dahlia -- 2006 -- R

One thing I really hate about trying to type a review in MySpace is the unpredictability of the system. I had spent 30 minutes typing something up for The Black Dahlia in giving some thoughtful insights and opinions about the film. I had to leave it for a moment, and then I came back and picked up where I left off. I clicked on the screen to make sure it was NOT highlighted, and when I started typing, it deleted the whole thing. Noooooooo!

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This is not the first time this has happened. The real reason it took me a month to post anything about Pirates of the ..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is because it was deleted on two occasions, and after a couple of deletions, you get a bit discouraged. Add to this a few time where I clicked the "post" button, and instead of posting, I get a MySpace error which also deletes everything I've written. I'm now typing this in Word, which is a far more stable platform than MySpace, and hopefully, I will be able to keep this on track.

 

EDIT: Shall I point out the errors created above? I am tempted to remove them, but given that the first part of this is frustration over MySpace giving errors, there they are... Well, I admit that I did try three or four time to edit them out, but I kept getting errors and it wouldn't save, and this is the third time I've tried to add this smart-mouthed edit as well... And this is the fourth time I've tried to save it after fixing a screw-up of the line spacing. Argh!

 

Ok, about the Black Dahlia…I decided to catch up on my Oscar nominees and give this one a viewing, not only for the Oscar reason, but also for my love of a good mystery and serial killer stories. What I get is an ok mystery, and a film steeped in subplots.

 

The base advertised story is the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short from the late 1940's. Her body was found in an open field, naked, disemboweled, and an ear to ear smile cut into her. The main character is a cop who ends up being associated with this case, but the case itself turns out to be one subplot in a myriad of plots surrounding this guy's life. We don't even get into the case until we're 30 minutes into the film. Before then, we get lots of backstory about how this guy was a boxer, and how he ended up with his partner. Other plots in this enormous tale include the cops' relationship with a woman who may or may not be involved in the Dahlia case, his relationship with his partner's girlfriend, the boxing angle, his father's situation, his involvement with another unrelated case, and I think that's it. I could be wrong. It was a lot to get through to get to the heart of the matter of this Dahlia situation, and it is arguable whether every single one of this plot strands was necessary to tell the story.

 

The advantage to all of these is one well rounded main character cop. We get him in so many different situations with so many different people that we get a good idea of who he is as a person. He wasn't all about the plot the whole time, and he's not perfect either. So not bad there. Everyone else is fairly decent if they got some time with him. His partner was pretty good, his partner's girlfriend was decent, and as we move further away from them, they get less and less, but overall given that everyone got only a piece of the puzzle, they didn't turn out bad. Elizabeth Short's character was actually pretty good considering we only got some backstory, hearsay, and some movie clips.

 

The problem we run into with all of these plot strands is trying to tie them up efficiently. Since the movie desires to provide a neat resolution to an unsolved case, it does it in a very long and almost convoluted manner stretching to get every piece of actual evidence tied up in a neat package of a mad reasoning. Before that, we had to get an explanation of a plot twist we didn't know was twisted that throws you for a bit of a loop on one of the other characters. Once we get these extended explanations of how the murder was done and why this character did what he did, the story is not yet over because there is still one thread to tie up to further explain why the other twisted thing happened to further mess up your impression of this tale. While the story stays interesting enough, it gets to be a bit much because while you can get away with this sort of thing in a novel, in a film, once the climax is over, it's time to get out. This one took its time getting out. The final scene was great, but getting there was a chore.

 

As for the murder explanation…meh, it was ok. I was hoping for something over the top and colossal to it, but it turned out to be kind of mundane despite its grizzliness. Maybe that was the intent, but for me, it fell really flat. The film has a lot of really good tension as the cop investigates various places, though; DePalma can really build up the suspense.

 

So in the end, the movie ends up being a good drama as the cop fights his way through life (almost literally), but falls a bit flat as it tries to cross too many genres and accomplish too much. The promise of the Black Dahlia mystery is delivered, but buried within a plot too deep to really appreciate it. But if you like plot-rich films, you may just like this one.