70-year old Philip Marlowe is snooping around in the dark
alleys of an ersatz 1939 Los Angeles beating up punks and turning down sexual
advances from black-eyed blondes. That’s pretty much what we get in the new
Neil Jordan-directed “Marlowe,” the latest in a long line of film noirs
featuring Raymond Chandler’s mythic private dick. He’s been played by Humphrey
Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Dick Powell, James Garner and Robert Montgomery, and
others. Seventy-year-old Liam Neeson, in his 100th movie, takes a
crack at the character this time around, and comes off a bit shopworn and
somewhat out of focus.
One reason for the slightly out of focus presentation of
Chandler’s urban knight—the man who lives by a code and walks the mean streets
of LA “neither tarnished nor afraid,” – is that the script by William Monahan
is based not on one of Chandler’s novels, but on a “Chandler-estate-approved
novel” called, “The Black Eyed Blonde” by Irish novelist John Banville. The
novel and the film have a seemingly simple plot. Claire Cavendish (Diane
Kruger), a married blonde heiress with black eyes, hires Marlowe to find Nico
Peterson, her missing lover, a movie stunt man. Of course, nothing is ever
really that simple in a Marlowe story, because no sooner does the investigation
get underway than Nico turns up dead in a parking lot of the Cabana Club with
his skull crushed by a car, which makes a positive identification somewhat tricky.
Except his body was identified by his sister. That seems to settle the matter
of identification, until later on the sister is beaten, tortured and killed,
and Marlowe wonders what’s up with that?
Marlowe’s employer refuses to believe that her lover is
dead. She wants him to keep digging and find out if he’s alive and where he’s
hiding. Marlowe’s quest for the truth brings him into contact with the usual weird
assortment of film noir characters, including Dorothy Quincannon (Jessica Lange,
who is first presented as Claire’s mother and then in a plot shift that seemed
borrowed from “Chinatown” turns out to be Claire’s aunt. “She’s my daughter.
She’s my niece. She’s my . . .”) In fact, the shadow of “Chinatown” looms even
more ominously over “Marlowe” with the introduction of night club owner Floyd
Hanson played by John Huston’s son Danny Huston, who basically gives Marlowe
the old spiel John Huston’s Noah Cross gave Jake Gittes about life being so
fouled up it’s impossible for anyone to do any good in this world. But that
doesn’t stop Marlowe. He keeps sniffing and snooping, running into creeps like crooked
antiques dealer Lou Hendricks (Alan Cumming), a cross between Clifton Webb and
Tennessee Williams, and his driver Cedric (Akinnuoye-Agbaje), who’s pretty big
and pretty handy with a machine gun.
Jordan, Monahan and Neeson try their best to do justice
to Chandler’s Marlowe, but it’s hit and miss at best. Neeson pulls off the
“world-weary hero” look, but it’s obviously not much of a stretch. There’s basically
some inconsistency in Monahan’s script. At times the characters utter lines
that cop quotes from Christopher Marlowe, with references to the Bard, that somehow
seem as artificial as a BBC teleplay. Marlowe keeps telling everybody he’s just
an average guy, a working stiff, but still everyone treats him with some kind
of awe, with one character telling him he lives like a monk. It’s like the
filmmakers on one hand want to show Marlowe is just a tough guy doing
everybody’s dirty work, nothing special, while at the same time trying to
canonize him as a saint.
The use of locations in Barcelona and Dublin shot with a
reddish filter give “Marlowe” a dated look, but there are few if any wider
shots showing L.A. as it was in1939 so you get a claustrophobic feeling. You
wish Neeson would wander off the set once in a while and get a drink somewhere
in a bar down on Long Beach, with the oil wells pumping in the background. L.A.
was always a character in Chandler’s books. Its absence here is a real
handicap. Another troublesome aspect is David Holmes’ soundtrack score. The repeated
use of “These Foolish Things” in the background, kept reminding me more of Monica
Lewinsky (it was her and Bill’s favorite song, according to her) than the plot
involving Claire Cavendish. And there is one scene where Marlowe drives his
Plymouth coupe onto the grounds of a palatial chateau where the band playing
“Brazil” at full volume sounds more like Ernie Kovacs’ Nairobi Trio. Why were
there so many Tangos played over the course of a film set in ’39 in L.A.?
A weird side note: “Marlowe” is no classic, but it does
have something in common with one of the great ones ---Howard Hawks’ classic, “The
Big Sleep (1946).” When Hawks was filming “The Big Sleep,” (1946) there’s a
scene where a limo drives off a pier and the driver drowns. The screenwriters
(Leigh Brackett, William Faulkner, and Jules Furthman) asked Hawks who killed
him. Hawks didn’t know and they contacted Chandler and he said he didn’t know
either. In “Marlowe” someone is killed and has his skull crushed so it would
look like it was Nico Peterson. But it turned out it wasn’t Nico. So who was
it? Never explained. Who cares? Just
another bit player, another nameless face lost in the blurry background of
Tinseltown.
“Marlowe” may not go down as a great addition to the
Marlowe canon but it’s better than nothing and despite its flaws, it is good to
see serious movie makers trying their hand at it, even if not that
successfully. There’s a need for someone to do Philip Marlowe justice,
especially now.