Neil Jordan fails to find form in this confused and Iberian attempt to revive the legacy of Raymond Chandler.
Forty-four years have passed since the last time a feature film was built around Raymond Chander's tougher-than-tough fictional detective Philip Marlowe, an absence from the screen that seems unduly long and now, after Neil's "Marlowe" Jordan, not so much. enough. A flimsy, fake attempt at vintage noir, the film is not an adaptation of a Chandler play, but of "The Black-Eyed Blonde," a 2014 Marlowe authorized entry by Irish novelist John Banville. However, minus Banville's knack for literary ventriloquism, this European co-production evidently can't help but feel removed by various degrees from the real thing, not helped by the gawky, gangly presence of a wildly miscast Liam Neeson in the shoes that a they once occupied by Bogart and Mitchum.
Director: Neil Jordan
Writers: William Monahan, John Banville, Raymond Chandler
Stars: Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, Jessica Lange
After a low-key opening as a closing film at this year's San Sebastian Film Festival, "Marlowe" will be released in the United States by Open Road Films on December 2, though even with the prestige of Jordan, Neeson and their co-stars Diana. Kruger and Jessica Lange, it is doubtful that the film left much of a trace before, like many Philip Marlowe quarries, disappearing without a trace. For Jordan, a far cry from the artful genre stunts of "The Crying Game," or even the wink-camp delights of 2018's "Greta," this feels like a particularly listless pro forma effort, identifiable as his only to through the curious Irish anachronisms. that dot his script supposedly set in California and that of "The Departed" screenwriter William Monahan.
As it is, Dublin and Barcelona take turns standing in for Chandler's fictional "Bay City" district of Los Angeles, neither of which is very convincing; Cinematographer Xavi Giménez paints over geographic disparities with a uniform yellow filter that at least gives an appropriate twilight air to the proceedings. The year is 1939, the same year that Marlowe made his literary debut under that name in "The Big Sleep," but the detective of the same name is a much older and more tired figure than in the Chandler stories of the time, leaning more towards resigned shrugs than towards cynical jokes, each of his lines emerging as a kind of sigh.
It is with this eternally weary air that Marlowe enters the business with glamorous Irish-American heiress Clare Cavendish, who recruits him to investigate the disappearance of her lover, small-time Hollywood actor Nico Peterson. Initial investigations suggest he was murdered at an elite members' club run by pinstripe thug Floyd Hanson, though "Marlowe" isn't about to let his audience go home so early.
Others complicating this undead investigation include lewd gangster Lou Hendricks, his ambiguously loyal chauffeur Cedric, and Clare's former movie star mother, Dorothy Quincannon, a hostile and reserved woman whose question marks only begin with her pronounced English pronunciation. . "You're a long, long way from Tipperary, Dorothy," Marlowe murmurs in the film's most inadvertently funny line: audiences may well wonder how close she once was.
Chandler's plots were never designed to be neatly unraveled: the best of them are so cryptic as to be immersive, drawing readers and viewers into the characters' own obsessive circle. "Marlowe," however, offers inscrutability without intrigue, its mystery too easily solved and its motivation too murky to pass the test, while its various villains and macguffins and red herrings check the genre boxes without generating the atmospheric haze. necessary. Meanwhile, Marlowe himself should come across as distant, but not as out of touch as he seems here: the veritable gorge of missing chemistry between Neeson's gumshoe and Kruger's femme fatale ensures that neither side's persistence in the case makes much sense. . "He must feel something between us," Clare purrs after a prickly encounter between Marlowe and her ineffectual husband, waiting a moment before adding, "Something sexual." The public may be happy with the clarification.
Jordan and Monahan are interested in the kind of dialogue that wouldn't have made it past Hays Code in the heyday of film noir, but its preponderance of four-letter words and more blunt allusions makes "Marlowe" feel more contrived than nervous, an exercise in permissive cosplay. instead of a new gender intervention.
Watch Marlowe 2022 Movie Trailer
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