Scott Cooper has had a bizarre career. Ever since his feature debut, Crazy Heart, won an Oscar, Cooper has opted for genre films that land with a palpable sense of shame. That is not to say that Black Mass or Out of the Furnace explore shame in any meaningful way. Instead, Cooper tries to toe the line between genre and respectability, two sensibilities that are necessarily at odds because he seems to thinks pure genre filmmaking is beneath him. Perhaps Cooper feels that anything too lurid might lose any potential audience, which be would ironic, since conviction is precisely the quality a genre film needs to succeed. His latest is The Pale Blue Eye, a historical mystery/horror film, and it continues in this tradition. Too respectable for horror aficionados and too violent for general audiences, at least it is also too forgettable to be truly tedious.
Working from a screenplay he adapted from Louis Bayard’s novel of the same name, Cooper imagines a bleak New York winter in the 19th century that almost acts like a punchline for those who attempt to build civilization around it. It is 1830, and a cadet at United States Military Academy in West Point was found dangling from a noose. The details of the death suggest foul play, so the brass at the Academy hire the detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) to investigate. Landor’s methods are intuitive and peculiar, and he unnerves the military brass who only want the matter resolved quickly. The investigation leads Landor to Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling), except here he is a young man, a cadet at the Academy, and not yet the beloved writer whose work remains in the public domain. Together they form an uneasy alliance, one that leads them toward the occult and secret societies.
At first, The Pale Blue Eye is content to exist within the familiar parameters of a procedural. Landor follows the clues, meets some unsavory characters and nurses the kind of personal problems the afflict all detectives who appear in films like this. Bale avoids the eccentricities that Johnny Depp deployed in Sleepy Hollow and From Hell, two obvious influences on this film, and instead suggests a kind of weariness that disarms “society” types who let decorum govern their every impulse.
Some of these respectable people include Thayer (Timothy Spall), the superintendent at West Point, and the Mrs. Marquis (Gillian Anderson), who drones on like her elocution requires herculean effort. The mere appearance of these high-quality actors suggests a good time, and yet Cooper loses the narrative thread when he abandons the procedural, instead focusing on a half-assed anthropological study of social mores. There are stretches where everyone, including Landor, seems to forget there is a killer at large.
Even the Poe character, who becomes more sympathetic as the film continues, loses sight of the plot. It is an admittedly ironic mistake, as Poe’s short stories helped invent mystery fiction and its corresponding psychological toll. Melling’s performance is a good foil for Bale’s, since his Poe is fidgety, acting like a kind of dandy who stands in contrast to Landor, a sullen drunk (Melling also speaks with an affected Virginia accent, a flourish that may not jibe with Poe’s biography). At least Cooper gets Poe’s look right, his slight frame and boxy haircut are a perfect match for his most famous portrait
Those details are more fun than the film itself, as it spins too many plates for its middle hour, a bizarre conceit because the final minutes go back to the mystery focus. There is a tacked-on, hackneyed resolution where one character dutifully goes through the events of the film, putting them in a different light until we have a completely new sense of several important characters. The patient, explanation-heavy detective is a necessary, even welcome trope in detective fiction, and parts of The Pale Blue Eye would rather ignore them because Cooper wants his film also to play out like a costume drama that you might find in an Edith Wharton adaptation.
Parts of the The Pale Blue Eye look ominous, with Cooper shooting in stark, bright colors that make each splatter of blood pop that much more. But by not committing to one type of film, he robs both the mystery and drama of their pleasures, whether it’s the satisfaction of a whodunit or a perceptive exploration of manners and human nature.
Photo courtesy of Netflix
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