Vintage gumshoe resurrected by Neeson in tired perspective
The richly hard-boiled terrain of detective Philip Marlowe has always been, to quote Raymond Chandler, “a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.”
Chandler’s Los Angeles gumshoe has stretched across some of the most fertile decades of American cinema, from Howard Hawks’ “The Big Sleep” (1946) to Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” (1973). Having been played by Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, Robert Mitchum, among others, he’s less a character than a legacy to be passed down.
But it’s been almost half a century since Marlowe was notably portrayed on the big screen. “Marlowe,” with Liam Neeson as the private eye, is a bid to recapture some old-school, tough-talking movie magic. And, intriguingly, “Marlowe” is not taken directly from Chandler. It’s instead an original (albeit deeply faithful) interpretation of the character penned by William Monahan (screenwriter of “The Departed”), adapted from John Banville’s 2014 book, “The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel.”
The urge for imitation is an understandably strong one. Who wouldn’t want to write sentences like: “She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.” And “Marlowe” seemingly has all the requisite trappings. So why does — to paraphrase Chandler again — “Marlowe” mostly just kill time and die hard?
The film is a handsomely made period piece crafted with obvious affection for film noir by veteran director Neil Jordan
(“The Crying Game”), plus a top flight cast including Neeson, Diane Kruger, Jessica Lange, Danny Huston and Alan Cumming. Yet “Marlowe,” enveloped with a strong smell of mothballs, feels like an old pinstripe suit that’s been taken out of the closet for no apparent reason. Neeson’s Marlowe punches harder, but that’s about all that distinguishes the film, which has made surprisingly little effort to reconsider Marlowe from a new perspective.
The year is 1939. We’re back in early LA, a still deeply intoxicating moment in pre-freeway California. Unfortunately, as delicious as some settings here can be, “Marlowe” was largely shot in Dublin and Barcelona, robbing the tale of possibly its most important character: Los Angeles.
“Marlowe” opens with a mysterious woman (Kruger) enlisting Marlowe for a job. She wants him to find her lost lover (Francois Arnaud), a search that leads the detective to an exclusive members’ club that has some very vicious things going on behind closed doors. It’s overseen by the wide-smiling Floyd Hanson (Huston), whose toothy grin barely disguises his underlying menace. Like Marlowe, he’s a veteran of the war, and if anything sticks in this stale tale, it’s the way he shrugs off past horrors while carrying them into daily life. But “Marlowe” lacks both a meaningful mystery for Marlowe or a narrative as lusciously oblique as “The Big Sleep.”
And as much as Neeson might seem to have the special set of skills required to play Marlowe, his detective feels hollow and maybe a little too tired. Neeson can be a man of rugged force on screen, of course, but his thin growl is less suited to hard-boiled poetry than you would think. No, the best Marlowe is still the first: Dick Powell in 1944’s “Murder, My Sweet.”
MPA rating: R (for language, violent content, some sexual material and brief drug use) Running time: 1:50
How to watch: In theaters