Rated: R. Opens Friday. Brian De Palma is, and has always been, the enemy of restraint. So to expect his adaptation of James Ellroy's novel The Black Dahlia to resemble Curtis Hanson's much-loved film of Ellroy's LA Confidential is foolish. Hanson made Ellroy's dark noir into a serious and realistic police thriller, turning lurid twists into Oscar-winning drama. De Palma, the master of excess, takes Ellroy's fictionalization of a true story and makes it even faker, turning in a stylized, lush, over-the-top film that has little connection to reality. The Black Dahlia seems to exist in a world where pulp novels and film noir constitute the entirety of actual history, and that's the perfect world for a film sensualist like De Palma to inhabit.
Bucky and Lee are assigned to work on the case known as the Black Dahlia, a gruesome murder that quickly becomes a media circus and provides a look into the seedy underbelly of the film industry (one of Ellroy's favorite themes). Lee becomes obsessed with solving the case, to the alarm of his steadfast girlfriend, Kay (Scarlett Johansson), who spends as much time with Bucky as she does with Lee.
From there, things only get more complicated, and eventually encompass elements of Lee and Kay's shady past, and Bucky's sordid affair with bisexual socialite Madeleine Linscott (Hilary Swank). The film is more about the dangerous obsessions of Bucky and Lee than it is about the search for the killer, whose identity is revealed almost incidentally in an exposition-heavy climax (the real killer was never discovered).
It's not the plotting, though, that's the central appeal of the film, but De Palma's sumptuous evocation and updating of the classic noir style. Hartnett, with his vaguely damaged pretty-boy looks, is the perfect modern analogue to the square-jawed 1940s film-noir hero. Swank, sporting an inscrutable accent, hams it up as the femme fatale, and the eccentric Linscott family provides some of the film's most disturbing and funny moments, especially during an increasingly bizarre dinner scene as Bucky gets to know far more than he bargained for about Madeleine's parents and sister.
Ever the visual show-off, De Palma effectively recalls classic noir with wipes and fades and impressive crane shots, and Mark Isham's wonderful score fits the mood perfectly without sounding like a noir parody. Early on, when Kay asks him why he doesn't have a girlfriend, Bucky tells her he's holding out for Rita Hayworth, and the way De Palma frames Johansson, she might as well be Rita Hayworth, the idealistic representation of all that is pure and good in Bucky's nasty, corrupt world.
It's a world in which De Palma is very comfortable, playing with his pet themes of voyeurism and the inherent invasive nature of film in the series of screen tests that the police unearth of Betty, played by Kirshner as a potent mix of innocent and sultry; De Palma himself is the voice of the unseen director urging her to bare more of herself, both physically and emotionally. He pushes the audience in the same way, daring you to simultaneously laugh and recoil at the damaged and deranged Linscott matriarch played by an excellent Fiona Shaw. Filmed primarily not in LA but on soundstages in Bulgaria, The Black Dahlia exists in its own universe, and can only be taken on its own terms. Forget it, Bucky, the film seems to say. It's De Palma-town.