The Black Dahlia

Brian DePalma’s The Black Dahlia steadily exercises several sorts of low-grade fascination without ever becoming genuinely interesting. This most recent cinematic foray into the story of the still-unsolved murder of Betty Short (aka “the Black Dahlia”) in Los Angeles in 1947 is based on the James Ellroy novel of the same name, and that means the film focuses more on two cops (played by Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart) who are obsessed with the case than on the famous case itself. The Black Dahlia herself is present only as a corpse and as a pointedly pathetic figure (played by Mia Kirshner) in a few brief black-and-white sequences (some shabby-looking “screen tests” and a porno reel). DePalma’s interpolation of the fictional “screen tests,” and some actual excerpts from the 1928 silent horror classic The Man Who Laughs, very nearly reduces the film to something like the morbid musings of a cinephile auteur. Hilary Swank, playing a perversely deceptive Black Dahlia lookalike, brings a certain chilly conviction to the film’s most elaborately outlandish character, but she and the other featured players are all more or less cast adrift in the semi-incomprehensible stream of revelations and reversals that overwhelms the final stages of the story.