“I'm getting too old for this,” muses Philip Marlowe (Liam Neeson), after a disjointed fight. His latest on-screen foray, Neil Jordan's Marlowe, suggests that Raymond Chandler's noble gumshoe may be right, and that it's finally time for cinema's most famous hardened detective to retire from active screen duty. Based on one of several authorized print revivals of the character, John Banville's 2014 'The Black-Eyed Blonde', Jordan's film brings out some familiar thematic and stylistic tropes of noir, but beyond its self-reflexive touches and a Distinctly Irish in flavor, the film sheds little new light on a hero whose last truly revisionist incarnation was Elliott Gould's modern-day Marlowe in Robert Altman's 1973's The Long Goodbye. He is not so much an old hat as a sodden fedora.
Lacking both Chandlerian charm and complexity, this version relies on Liam Neeson's handsome gaunt lead and some racy characters played by the likes of Danny Huston, Alan Cumming, and Jessica Lange. Marlowe may be an undemanding gala opportunity in San Sebastian and Zurich, but he seems unlikely to resonate with a wider audience, as this particular take on retro-noir isn't so much an old hat as a sodden fedora.
Director: Neil Jordan
Writers: William Monahan, John Banville, Raymond Chandler
Stars: Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, Jessica Lange
The setting is 1939 Los Angeles, the year Chandler published his first Marlowe novel 'The Big Sleep'. Stepping into Humphrey Bogart's revered brogue accents, though he feels closer to Robert Mitchum's 1970s Marlowe from Farewell, My Lovely and The Big Sleep, is Neeson, a memorable leading man in Jordan's 1996 Michael Collins. In the traditional visit to the investigator's office is the traditional mystery lady, one Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger), a wealthy married woman who wants Marlowe to track down her missing lover, a small-time, full-time movie figure Lothario. called Nico Peterson. It appears Peterson has been hit and killed outside the Tie Club, a fancy venue with not-so-fancy nighttime attractions.
Marlowe plays cat and mouse in his initial questioning of the club's manager, Floyd Hanson (a curiously menacing Danny Huston). Unsurprisingly, it turns out that Peterson isn't really dead, but running some shady deals in Mexico, so who and what is behind the faked death? Marlowe investigates the murky pit of corruption, with the help of his cop pals Joe Green (Ian Hart, to raucous beats more reminiscent of a Damon Runyon character) and Chandler's original creation, Bernie Ohls (Colm Meaney). And he himself leans, with varying degrees of venomous kindness, on Clare's mother, Dorothy Quincannon (Lange), a former silent movie goddess, and mobster Lou Hendricks (Alan Cumming, as a maturely silky redneck).
Drawing on the book by respected Irish literary novelist Banville, which has a thriller sideline under the crime name 'Benjamin Black', Marlowe eccentrically throws in old-country wherever he fits: some James Joyce talk; Mrs. Cavendish's name is Clare, like the county; Marlowe having served with the Royal Irish Rifles; even a gag about "a shamus named Seamus." Also from Banville is a play on Marlowe's name, with a character quoting a line from that playwright's 'Doctor Faustus': "Why, this is hell..."
With some wildly incongruous jokes about the famous MacGuffins of the screen, the clever script by Jordan and William Monahan (Scorsese's The Departed, George Clooney's The Tender Bar) doesn't feel devious enough in its plot or fresh enough in its reinvention. of his hero or his world of Los Angeles. The roles and eventual fates of Clare and Hendricks' black driver Cedric (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) somewhat align the mythos with 21st-century political consciousness, but only superficially, given the poorly conceived characters.
Otherwise, the juice is in some of the turns, especially from Cumming, the reliably creepy Huston, and a majestic Lange. Neeson, though perhaps the least humorous screen Marlowes, nonetheless mixes worldly regret with monolithic toughness to commanding effect. Cinematographer Xavi Jiménez and designer John Beard put in all the appropriate noir touches (neon signs appropriately reflected in puddles of rain), but this isn't remotely a film that tries to reimagine Chandlerland from the ground up and, more generally, Marlowe.
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