Venice Shines On A Night Of Dark Crime

Sydney Morning Herald

Friday September 1, 2006

Garry Maddox

The film festival has opened with a noirish murder story, writes Garry Maddox in Italy.

THE winged golden lions had been lowered into position. Filmmakers, actors and critics from around the world had arrived by boat. And in shimmering sunshine, the 63rd Venice Film Festival opened with a dark chapter in Hollywood history.

The gruesome murder of an aspiring actress, Betty Short, is the centre of the thriller The Black Dahlia, which stars Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart as Los Angeles cops who take on the case.

Both are boxers, tagged Fire and Ice when they were matched in the ring before becoming partners in the homicide investigation. And they share an interest in a glamourpuss with a troubled past, played by Scarlett Johansson.

Based on a James Ellroy novel, noirish Los Angeles is murkier than Venice's famous canals.

In real life, the 1947 murder was particularly gruesome. Short was found in a vacant lot, cut in half with her organs removed and blood drained. Even more disturbingly, her mouth was slashed to resemble a sickening grin.

Ellroy turned the unsolved case into a novel, hoping to exorcise the demons from the murder of his own mother.

The director Brian De Palma has adapted it into a twisting tale that features police corruption, shoot-outs, double identities and illicit secrets.

Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert (Hartnett) tries to stay honest as his investigations reveal the corruption beneath the city's prosperous surface. He gets involved with a wealthy woman with a mysterious past (Hilary Swank) that includes sex with the victim. kd lang appears briefly as a singer in a lesbian bar.

Flanked by the filmmakers at a press conference, Ellroy called the Black Dahlia case "the first media-manufactured murder in American history".

Turning it into a movie seems timely given another unsolved murder making headlines. Johansson made a veiled reference to the JonBenet Ramsey case in commenting that in troubled times, salacious crimes seemed to distract people from their lives. "We've seen it in the past and it's happening now," she said.

American crime stories are the subject of two other films premiering at the festival - Bobby, about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, and Hollywoodland, which looks at the mysterious death of Superman actor George Reeves.

Given Venice's reputation for positioning American films for the Oscars - Brokeback Mountain won the Golden Lion last year - The Black Dahlia was seen before the festival as this year's L.A. Confidential, another crime drama based on an Ellroy novel that won acclaim in 1997.

In the ways of the film world, 1940s Los Angeles was re-created in Bulgaria for The Black Dahlia.

The movie looks the film noir goods but never quite convinces as a crime thriller, partly because few in the strong cast deliver their best work. After his star turn in Thank You For Smoking, Eckhart clearly makes a better lobbyist than a boxing champ, and Johansson, while poutingly sexy, has not enough to do.

But there are some poignant scenes, with Mia Kirshner playing Short in a series of unsuccessful screen tests opposite the unseen De Palma as her director.

She is a young beauty whose life turned tragic after moving to Hollywood to become a star and having to get by on the kindness of strangers. As one of her friends tells the investigators, the problem wasn't too many enemies, it was too many friends.

© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald

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