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'The Black Dahlia': All look and no substance

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Much anticipated on the Internet and among cinéastes of a certain age, "The Black Dahlia," alas, is a big, flashy dud from Brian De Palma, who's become something of an expert in big, flashy duds.

Ever since he poured pig's blood on Sissy Spacek in "Carrie," his career has been in decline. Well, there are a few exceptions, including "Blow Out" with John Travolta, and "Casualties of War" with a shattering Sean Penn, one of the most brutally effective films ever made. But that leaves at least another dozen bombs, including "Scarface," which may be a camp classic now, but De Palma was dead serious when he made it.

Universal Pictures

'The Black Dahlia'

The verdict: Slummingly salacious and generally rotten to the core.

Director: Brian De Palma
Starring: Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Hilary Swank, Aaron Eckhart, Mia Kirshner
Run time: 121 minutes
Release date: Sept. 15, 2006
Rating: R for strong violence, some grisly images, sexual content and language.
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On the web
Official movie site
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He's dead serious again in "The Black Dahlia," and for a while — maybe the first 40 minutes — the movie works pretty well. But as the plot becomes more convoluted, the tone more overripe and the performances heedlessly over-the-top, the picture digs its own film noir grave — all look and no substance.

Based on a novel by the smugly perverse James Ellroy, "The Black Dahlia" recounts the short life and gruesome death of a peripheral starlet named Betty Short (well-played in stag film flashbacks by Mia Kirshner). So named because of a flower she wore in her hair, Betty — or what was left of her — was found in a field, missing most of her innards and with her face slashed ear to ear in a ghoulish clown's grin.

There really was a Betty Short whose murder in 1947 remains one of Hollywood's great unsolved mysteries. Offering their lip-smacking notions of what might have happened, Ellroy and De Palma manage to eviscerate poor Betty all over again. (Notably, in the awkward and degrading auditions/stag films we watch, that's De Palma's off-camera voice giving Betty directions.)

Betty isn't the protagonist here, merely the victim. Josh Hartnett (just terrible) and Aaron Eckhart (not bad) play Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert and Leland "Lee" Blanchard, L.A. cops who bond over their shared pugilist past and Lee's platonic girlfriend, Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson, so luminously lit she looks positively radioactive). Assigned Betty's case, Lee becomes obsessed with her murder, and Bucky becomes obsessed with, well, his best friend's girl.

Another player is luscious Madeleine Linscott (a panther-ish Hilary Swank), who may know a few things about whatever happened to poor Betty. The black diamond to Kay's pearlescent gleam, she's sultry, bisexual, and has a rich daddy straight out of "Chinatown" (which this film desperately wishes it was).

De Palma pulls off a few virtuoso shots, most notably a stylized re-creation of the famed Zoot Suit Riots that tore L.A. apart in the 1940s and a murder on a vertigo-inducing circular stairwell. But most of what he does is empty and showy, as if he thinks he can get by on surface sordidness — like Betty's trembling auditions or the gotta-see-it-to-believe-it lesbian club where everyone strikes Busby Berkeley poses and K.D. Lang vamps her way through Cole Porter.

Confusing and eventually just really annoying, "The Black Dahlia" wants to be the last word in '40s Hollywood decadence. Instead, it comes perilously close to unintentional camp. Just like, well, "Scarface."

And as they say, those who don't learn from their mistakes ...