Liam Neeson in Marlowe Photo: Open Road Films
The dark and violent world of Raymond Chandler’s hardened private investigator Philip Marlowe brings to mind many descriptions. Hard. two-handed. Cynical. “Elegant” is way down on that list. But a little elegance, expressed in decent production values, tight pacing and long sideways camera angles, is the main thing director Neil Jordan has to offer in the largely misguided Marlowe, the latest of perhaps too many attempts at the old wine of Chandler’s fiction pour into new bottles and then sell the resulting brew as a vintage.
Marlowe is a weird duck of a movie. It features recognizable genre contours, including telltale blondes; Thrust-and-parry dialogue that plays out as sexual flirtation, even when it’s a direct portrayal; and Philip Marlowe is kicked and (almost) drugged. It’s also very meta. But at this point, so are Marvel movies; Self-reflexivity is perhaps the “old-school thing” that Marlowe has to offer.
This is neo-noir written by a chatbot, or an Edward Hopper painting reimagined by DALL-E 2. Here, Spain doubles shaky for Los Angeles, and a 70-year-old Liam Neeson tests a character who is 38 in the original fiction. The blurriness of it all makes for a blurry memory of someone’s better film. No wonder Jordan called Marlowe something of a sci-fi flick, citing Ridley Scott as his main influence rather than Chandler.
2022
1h 50m
Crime/Mystery/Thriller
POUR
Liam Neeson
Philip Marlowe
Diane Krueger
Clare Cavendish
Jessica Long
Dorothy Cavendish
Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
cedric
Daniela Melchior
Lynne Peterson
DIRECTOR
Neil Jordan
SUMMARY
In the late 1930s, Bay City, a brooding, down-and-out detective, is hired to track down the ex-lover of a glamorous heiress.
In this tale, Marlowe is chasing a missing man who may have been murdered – a second-rate Lothario and occasional movie props master named Nico Peterson, ex-lover of Clare Cavendish (a fragile Diane Kruger whose chemistry with Liam Neeson is a daughter). at best). Clare was a perfume heiress in the source novel, but here she is the daughter of a former film siren (Jessica Lange) whose life has been intertwined with an Irish-American film mogul for years.
Based on a well-reviewed and estate-authorized Marlowe novel by John Banville in 2014, Jordan and screenwriter William Monahan cast Banville’s traditionalist Bay City milieu for a Tinseltown joy barely hinted at in the source — often to bizarre effect. A black chauffeur is an unlikely fan of Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, and based on poster signage, in the era of Gone with the Wind, The Philadelphia Story and The Wizard of Oz, the season’s hit appears to be a Mexican Spitfire B -magnifying glass image Velez. Danny Huston is cast as Heavy, one of many references to John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, which someone has to tell Jordan is a film about Detective Sam Spade.
Perhaps Jordan’s attempt to exorcise, or at least acknowledge, the Hollywood ghosts of Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, and Robert Mitchum is his noir homage grounded in a world of vintage film production. Bogie, Powell and Mitchum are the triumvirate of cinema’s Marlowe archetypes. Her trenchcoat silhouettes from Murder My Sweet, The Big Sleep and Farewell My Lovely tower over everything – even the Marlowe novels that predate them – just as Connery’s sneer and Craig’s pout now tower over everything James Bond.
When it comes to stripping the table of old symbols, it doesn’t work. It can’t. Because as Philip Marlowe, Liam Neeson is a pathetic – do you do that ominous – miscast by any metric other than Chandler’s description of Marlowe’s excessive height. However, believe Liam that he tried. Marlowe is reportedly his 100th film and he doesn’t specify it, rather falling into an obvious acting trap.
Marlowe has seen it all – he’s a voyeur of the very worst of human behavior and he’s world-weary to failure. Liam is just plain tired – laconic, not iconic. Where Bogie and even a comparatively aged Robert Mitchum were able to convey Marlowe as a man who at least remembers what caring feels like, Neeson goes through the motions, going through the motions. And the age thing doesn’t help. The only time Neeson’s Marlowe seems truly vulnerable is when he’s discussing the possibility of regaining his police pension. “I’m getting too old for this,” he moans after a fistfight, and with this sentence he lures the audience to agree.
It says something tiring but enduring about real Hollywood that at 70, Liam can still be cast as a romantic lead of sorts, while his co-star Jessica Lange, at 73, is portrayed as a witch past her prime. As Dorothy Cavendish, Lange serves no discernible plot function in Marlowe other than telling us how evil she is and providing a rhetorical focus on Clare’s alleged mothering issues. But Lange strays from a few solid one-liners as she sums up the Hollywood star by saying, “All you need are normal functions and the ability to read.” She later adds, “The key to Hollywood is there , knowing when the game is up” and reflecting on her own faded glory. The makers of Marlowe and the Chandler estate, who sanctioned it, should also consider this issue.