One of the difficulties of a private eye story lies with competence: if the PI is too good at their job, there’s no drama. If they’re too bad, same problem.
Making the detective a relentlessly supercool supersmart supersleuth can be fun but not necessarily engaging. Making them a buffoon turns the story into farce. (The Long Goodbye is great, but who in their right mind would ever hire the Elliott Gould Marlowe, muttering to his cat and looking bewildered in his own apartment?)
A PI has to be competent enough and human enough to serve as stand-in for the reader or viewer. Too rich, too spectacular, too useless, and that bond is lost.
At the same time, the PI has to be worth following around. Not necessarily likeable, but compelling. Mike Hammer in Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly is far from likeable, but he’s an interesting combination of corrupt and relentless. As William Goldman wrote, the detective is our guy and he’s all we have.
I went into Marlowe with tempered expectations and enjoyed it immensely.
The moment that clinched it, when I went from ‘this is okay’ to ‘this is quite good,’ occurs after Marlowe (Liam Neeson) dispatches a couple of toughs using fists and furniture. It’s a fight he wins easily, more reminiscent of Neeson’s action films than anything from a Raymond Chandler novel.
The film then cuts to a moment completely unnecessary to the plot: Marlowe post-fight, standing at the edge of the beach in the moonlight, shoes and socks off. Ostensibly he’s cleaning his hands off, but (excuse the preciousness) in fact he’s cleaning his soul, coming to terms with what he’s just gone through.
That moment I liked a lot. Without resorting to voiceover, it infused the character with a weariness and whimsy that fits Philip Marlowe. You can operate in the world, but it extracts a toll.
I won’t bother summarizing the plot, which is there. The supporting cast does their work well, especially Jessica Lange and Diane Kruger as mother and daughter ingenues. The film looks much better than the trailer. Neil Jordan nicely evokes interwar California out of post-pandemic Spain.
The script by William Monahan gives Chandler’s war service and failed oil career to Marlowe as backstory, and relies on literary allusions (Joyce, Kit Marlowe, even The Elements of Style) instead of film noir cliches. There’s little trace of the ‘we get it, you saw Out of the Past once’ noir pageantry that Cate Blanchett’s character in Nightmare Alley reeks of. Marlowe skirts May-December relationships and gives some strong moments to a Black supporting character, without feeling like revisionist history.
Everyone involved has done solid work in the genre. Neeson played the prime suspect in The Dead Pool, the worst-but-still-kinda-fun Dirty Harry film, and was good as Matthew Scudder in A Walk Among the Tombstones. Monahan wrote the adaptations for The Departed and a Colin Farrell film called London Boulevard, based off a book by Ken Bruen. Neil Jordan directed one of the best 1980s crime films, Mona Lisa, and the recent and underrated Greta. The source novel, a Chandler estate licensed book-product, was written by John Banville, who’s done a few fair-to-middling crime novels under the pen name Benjamin Black, as well as a nice introduction to one of the Richard Stark Parker novels. It’s a comfortable and confident and at times elegant film.
In the last couple of years there have been some very decent low budget crime films and westerns: Old Henry, Confess, Fletch, God’s Country, and Dead for a Dollar among them. In a world throttled by Marvel and Star Wars, this is where genre filmmaking has landed.
I was harsh on Marlowe when I saw the trailer, but I’m glad films like this still get made, and I’m very glad when they’re this good.
[My favorite Marlowe, by the way—Robert Mitchum in Farewell, My Lovely. My least favorite Marlowe? Robert Mitchum in The Big Sleep.]