The Black Dahlia (2006)

Rewatched 3/4/25 (Prime Video)

So I watched this blind to the novel a couple years ago despite having been made aware that it was a editing hack job by the studio. As someone who’s been charting a course to complete De Palma’s catalogue of movies, and as someone who even likes some of the “bad” ones, I remember hoping to and eventually finding enough of his signature moves and mechanics to win me over and lightly pass the movie.

I recently picked up the Ellroy book this is based on and crushed it in a couple days. One of the best books I’ve read in recent memory—pretty immersive, haunting, propulsive stuff. It made me more than a little queasy a few times and that’s hard to do when it comes to film and literature. Anyways I fired up this 2006 Josh Hartnett vehicle again and can now confirm it’s kind of a lemon.

First and foremost, I can see why De Palma got frustrated with Hollywood after this. It’s clearly chopped to shit and I would be very curious to see if the rumored 3hr+ cut remedies any of the wealth of  unwieldy plot jumps it makes. This is a final product with zero pacing confidence and no closure whatsoever. Even the novel, which Ellroy specifically points out is meant to lack closure like the real murder at its center, wraps up 10x more satisfyingly and coherently than this.

Hartnett is completely miscast outside of a few hand-to-hand combat moments that he excels in, which are oddly some of De Palma’s best-directed action moments to date?? His critical error is his confused facial reactions, which I just don’t think he had down at this point coming from a lot of teen rom-com roles. They have been honed since. Scarlett Johansson is clearly being told to go complete camp mode as if she was a character ported over from Body Double—strange. Hilary Swank remains the worst actor in Hollywood and just has no idea what the fuck she’s doing here. The supporting characters are all simultaneously over-the-top and unbelievably underdeveloped.

The only real performance worth watching in Dahlia is Aaron Eckhart, who I guess was lightly auditioning for Harvey Dent with this part? Another hot-headed authority figure dealing with big-city corruption and a love triangle. Eckhart’s character is also the best part of the novel and his actor here is the only one here who seems to understand what kind of movie he is in. Fiery and charismatic, he overdoes it, but in a way that feels half De Palma and half Ellroy. It’s a really smart, exciting amalgam of the two auteurs and it fits more than anything else. I guess I didn’t like his performance a couple years ago but I have definitely changed my tune—he’s the best part of the movie. Everything and everyone else feel disjointed, as if they arrived from different planets and didn’t understand Earth’s gravity or something.

The camp factor with the Johansson and Swank scenes in particular is dialed up to 11 and it is completely at odds with all the actual action that takes place in the film, which unfortunately peters out in the second half. There are flourishes of De Palma setpiece God-dom, including a decent Untouchables train station riff and a shootout gone wrong that ends way too quickly. The boxing match (again, the hand-to-hand stuff here is awesome) also should have been much longer—what we get is thrilling but it’s more of a high note than a greatest hit. And then there are just large swaths of screentime with very little tension to be felt or sense to be made.

I think part of the issue is also writer Josh Friedman, whose movies I do have some time for but is clearly not up to the task. Yes, I do think most of the dialogue oddity is due to De Palma but I just have a hard time believing Friedman’s script (even if we aren’t seeing all of it here) wasn’t the reason that Fincher left the project before De Palma took over. This book is way too expansive to fully adapt in one movie, probably better suited for TV, but Friedman’s work since has shown a similar penchant for silly scenes and a rocky pace.

It’s not the worst De Palma out there (I didn’t even mention the set design here which is pretty beautiful), but it’s an absolute butcher job of the novel and it sucks because I worry no one will try to adapt it again. Would still watch the 3-hour cut if anyone out there has insider information. They leave a lot of the best stuff in the book out of this movie.

4/10