Chad Taylor

The Black Dahlia

First saw it in France, with subtitles, which is the best way to see a Brian De Palma movie: the text is a constant tap on the shoulder, reminding you that it's a "film" and framing its artifice as, well... artifice. The movie version is monstrously inferior to Ellroy's novel, which in turn runs second to the author's White Jazz and American Tabloid: a seething, self-loathing, tangle that twists towards multiple resolutions, and is the greater for it. If you can survive the first 100 pages you will be hooked and rewarded.

David Fincher developed the movie version before being replaced by De Palma; I've always considered Fincher's lengthy, multiple-storylined Zodiac to be the modern imprint of how his Dahlia might have been. De Palma reduces the novel's layers to tight, trademark sequences that belie its multiple twists. Josh Friedman's workmanlike script makes a similar mistake, structuring the story with such concision that the main characters' emotional dips and dives - faithful to source - seem irrational and even silly. Josh Hartnett's Bucky is especially undermined, tearing up in almost every scene; Scarlett Johansson's Kay seems spoiled and childish rather than the complex mirror-of-the-Dahlia victim that she and all the other females in the novel become.

Still, even without subtitles I'll go the De Palma version for Scarlett's voice - a menthol woodwind cracking wise - Hillary Swank's ice-cold Madeleine, De Palma's steadicam introduction to the inbred Linscott family, and Fiona Shaw's extra crazy Ramona. For all the movie's (studio trimmed) gore and savagery Shaw provides its most ghastly moment using just her face and two fingers. Aaron Eckhart holds up his end as Lee Blanchard but true to 40s noir the men are redundant: it's the women who drive. Mia Kirshner plays the saddest girl in the world. The movie was much longer before the producers cut it down: it would be a dream to watch the version De Palma intended. Until then The Black Dahlia is a movie that could have been: a beautiful corpse, in pieces.