Philip Marlowe may be one of the most famous P.I.'s in all the detective canon, but in his 84-years of official existence in paperback, on film, and on the radio, the figment of his character tends to elude all but name. Technically created by Raymond Chandler in his breakthrough 1939 novel The Big Sleep, Marlowe was himself cannibalized from several tough, wise-cracking, but deceptively philosophical anti-heroes who had appeared under various noms de plume in the author's short stories. And if Chandler had pinned down the essence of a character, he had never been particularly concerned with the question of his age, or the continuity of his adventures. Therefore, if Philip Marlowe was a world-weary but youthful 33 in The Big Sleep (set in 1936), and only 42 in The Long Goodbye (taking place some 14 to 16 years later), we shouldn't scratch our heads too much if the new film Marlowe takes place in 1939, but now casts the 70-year-old Liam Neeson as a significantly older version of the character.
Marlowe itself is not based on an official work by Raymond Chandler, but rather a 2014 novel called The Black-Eyed Blonde, an estate-approved spin-off written by by Irish novelist John Banville under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. Directed by Neil Jordan and adapted by Jordan and screenwriter William Monahan, this new, confidently eponymous production comes with an interesting international coding, co-produced as it is by independent French, Irish, and Los Angelese companies. Set in the classic days of big sleeps and high windows, Marlowe is inescapably "neo" in its noir adjacency, taking cue from its source material by playing footsie with not only the period setting but its iconic character's age. Marlowe has been portrayed by very old actors before, most notably Robert Mitchum in two mediocre rehashes of Farewell, My Lovely and The Big Sleep that were made in the '70s by the same production company, but were technically not related to one another, the former set in 1941 and the latter being contemporary. But in as much as those cynical films epitomized the casting of actors to portray brutalist detective stereotypes, with no appreciation for the softer touches of Chandler's prose and characterization of Marlowe, Banville's variation on the character, and Neeson's casting, is done with a discernible purpose. As opposed to Mitchum's fossil stuck in time in the bad Big Sleep, the Marlowe of Marlowe is a creature of genre formulas and habits that is more sentimentally stuck in time, aged decades despite the fact that the world around him, while on the verge of change, never really meaningfully progresses. Against its period backdrop, the film alludes to the looming cynicism inspired by the First World War, anti-Mexican bigotry, the expansion of illicit drug trade across the border, and the steady mobilization of Hollywood for support of a new, rejuvenating war-effort. Himself a veteran of the first conflict, Neeson's Marlowe traverses the brief span of the film's historic window with a wry smile and suppressed bitterness, leaving it to the world the think up new reasons to justify the same assassination of youth, the same cannibalization of the glorious fallen (Chandler's predecessor detectives, and the millions of sacrificial soldiers) that created him.
The plot is serviceable stuff. Marlowe is hired by femme fatale Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger) to go looking for her disappeared lover, but the name she gives him turns out to be a fake one used to sign for a rental property where Clare and her lover would meet. As his client surreptitiously intended, Marlowe deduces that the real identity of her lover is one Nico Peterson (François Arnaud), a prop-master for the failing Pacific Studios, which is co-owned by her washed up starlet mother Dorothy Quincannon (Jessica Lange) and a corrupt entrepreneur and political hopeful simply referred to as The Ambassador (Mitchell Mullen). Problem is that Nico Peterson is already recorded as dead, his skull crushed under the wheel of a hit-and-run driver outside of a nightclub owned by one Floyd Hanson (Danny Huston). But, then, is Nico really dead? There are certainly many, including the Mexican cartel and a preening syndicate boss named Lou Hendricks (Alan Cumming) who very much have an invested interest in finding him - or, rather, finding whatever he's got. And is it really Clare, or rather her own mother, who had the more intimate relationship with Nico?
If this all sounds very convoluted, trust me, it's not. If anything, the progression of Marlowe is underscored by its moments of blunt force and brute address rather than the cryptic, atmospheric convolutions that made the original Big Sleep such a semi-surreal masterpiece. Seeming to anticipate the pre-telegraphed nature of its own highly affected, "noir-style" of mystery, the filmmakers attempt as much as possible to foreground the thematic and conceptual. Indeed, the most interesting aspects of Marlowe all come down to the ways that its international status is worn so subtly on its sleeve. With a particular eye towards the balancing act it attempts to strike between a style of thriller and mystery writing that is so affected, sentimental in its way, quirky in its cynicism, and yet explodes in outbursts of morbidity and violence that would have never gotten past the Hays Code censors, it's hard not to perceive the continuum from Banville's novel to Jordan and Monahan's screenplay as being in a meter similar to Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Whereas Jordan, an Irish writer and director, has been no stranger to noir in his career, Marlowe is so much more stylistically restrained than his work tends to be, and in the service of this ascendant interest by international filmmakers (particularly the Irish, apparently) in not simply appropriating American genre archetypes and formulas, but in using them to obliquely comment upon or rhetorically stage some aspect of the American psyche. With an Irish-American screenwriter under his wing (Monahan also wrote The Departed), and with American action cinema's favorite Irishman playing starkly against his gristly Taken type for something more "sensitive and perceptive," as Kruger's Clare Cavendish declares, there is something very odd and, at turns, legitimately involving about the film as some kind of work of reclamation and statement: Of the noir anti-hero as a new immigrant archetype, of the tendency of American popular culture to mythologize and obscure the permeance of its borders of conflict and corruption, of the infinite recursion of "classic" pessimistic themes...
It is unfortunate, therefore, that so many aspects of Marlowe are so miscalculated and, ultimately, uninteresting beyond the least textured surface level. There is a definite possibility that Neeson could make for a great Philip Marlowe, especially considering the long line of filmmakers and actors who, while perhaps not going as overboard as Robert Mitchum, totally missed the mark in terms of broaching his sensitivity and powers of perception. But Marlowe just isn't the movie. Neeson's performance is only ever truly exceptional in one rather effective moment between him and Kruger in his home, where she attempts to seduce him and he refuses. The rest of the time, he seems to have difficulty delivering the affected one-liners that Jordan and Monahan have put at his disposal. Part of the problem is that Neeson just isn't a funny or witty actor. You can read interviews with Humphrey Bogart and absolutely understand the ease with which he took rapid-fire dialog and made it seem like it was coming off naturally from his own endemic wit. But the schools and culture of acting just aren't the same as they were in those classic days, to say nothing of the pulp writing, and any attempts to mimic them only come off as pretense and measly imitation. Neeson has been parodied, but he himself has never been funny, or quick-witted. In his capacity to portray a more perceptive and sentimental Marlowe, he languishes awkwardly in being able to capture the obverse cynicism and gallows humor. Instead of speaking with confidence, he tries to play it up, and so comes up even shorter as he does not so much chew the scenery as nibble at it in a most pathetic and dispiriting way. This is not to single Neeson out, either. Indeed, he's still one of the better actors in the film, though Huston (a true character actor who could have absolutely walked among the classic Hollywood villains) comes out with the least blemishes. For everyone else, it's a uphill battle against the most affected of the stock parts from a dead end genre, where going too low (Kruger) or too high (Cummings) is all too easy, and just as disagreeable to one's sense of immersion.
This would all be one thing if Marlowe, from a technical perspective, offered something a little more than about what you'd expect from an HBO T.V. movie from 10 years ago. With rare exception, the cinematography of this film is just plain boring, flat, vague and muted to a degree that exemplifies how far stylists of such sensual aplomb as Jordan can fall when they succumb to the unflattering ease and economic thrift of digital filmmaking. And if you've got a sour opinion of Neeson's work as an action star, or, rather, the way his action scenes are choreographed and edited, be prepared for the rare fight scene in Marlowe. It's simply dire, borderline incomprehensible stuff.
But if there's any fatal flaw to Marlowe, it's sound, sound, sound. David Holmes's score is terrible, an unrelenting suite of mediocrity that borders on shopping center muzak. And if a bad score is one thing, a bad sound mix is another. It might just be that my theater played the film too quietly, but there's no getting the round the total absence of texture and variety in how Marlowe sounds. Volume is one thing, but if a machine gun goes off or a skull gets crushed under the wheel of a tire, and especially if Jordan clearly edits to emphasize impact, it should be mixed with more pronouncement than generic ambience or dialog. It's so bad, so lacking in definition or weight, that one wonders if something didn't go wrong in the post-production or distribution workflow, if this is literally the wrong export of the film with the wrong sound file for theaters. If this is the intended sound mix for a silver screen setting... All I can say is, there is nothing that will make you feel more like a movie isn't special, like you might as well be watching it at home, than if you're in a theater, and it sounds like you're watching it with the sound really low so that you don't wake up your partner. But even in that context, Marlowe is really pushing patience.
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