Marlowe

After a beautiful blonde hires him to find her former lover, Private Detective Phillip Marlowe becomes embroiled in an investigation with a wealthy family on the sun-soaked streets of 1939, Bay City, Los Angeles, California.

Classic hard-boiled gumshoe set-up, right?

Even if you’re not a fan of the genre, you can easily recognize its familiar shape in pop culture, and the character of Philip Marlowe is maybe the Ur-source of it all. Created by writer Raymond Chandler, an icon of the hard boiled crime genre, Marlowe seems almost like a natural result of the times, the inevitable voice of an era that has been ravaged by the Depression, abused by the Powerful, bruised, battered, betrayed, but still standing and looking for justice. Chandler has said as much of the character, "Marlowe just grew out of the pulps. He was no one person.”

First appearing in the The Big Sleep in 1939, Marlowe is a sepia-toned pre-WW2 Los Angeles era Knight Errant of sorts, smart, wisecracking, hard-drinking, violent when he needs to be, but also strongly moral, resisting the enticing overtures of the myriad of femme fatales he encounters, and accompanied by a sad jazzy saxophone wherever he goes. His wry observations and biting one-liners disguise not only a weary sense of purpose, but a strong sense of duty. Philip Marlowe is a man with a code in a world seemingly without one, and he lives by that code, no matter how much life may grind him down because of it.

This film, however, is not based off of any one specific story of Chandler’s. It’s based off The Black-eyes Blonde by Benjamin Black, a more recent novel that apparently has the Chandler Estate’s blessing.

Maybe that’s why, while still a good time, in the end, the movie feels a little more like cosplay noir than actual noir. The script seems more concerned with allusions than it is twists, with the appearance of being clever without actually being clever. For me, at least, there was just too much of an overall feeling that the film was more interested in riffing off the movie Chinatown than it was the work of Raymond Chandler, a film that obviously owes a huge debt to Chandler’s work, making this film a kind of weird film noir ouroboros.

I did appreciate Danny Huston showing up as the white-suited villain though, that was a fantastic nod to his father...

This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy the film, I did. It’s a good adult drama. It’s well-made, entertaining, and it hits all the beats it should. Admittedly, my disappointment probably stems mostly from me just expecting more of a twist to it all. All that aside, it’s a good film, and Liam Neeson is a good Marlowe, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Jessica Lange and Alan Cumming are both fantastic, and really shine in their scenes. Overall, it’s an enjoyable film, if not all that memorable of one.

A pleasantly entertained thumbs up.