Neil Jordan searches for morality.
Detective movies were finished off by the one-two punch of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), which were more than retreads but definitively reintroduced the genre’s moral purpose. If the genre survives, it resembles Liam Neeson playing the reincarnation of Raymond Chandler’s famous detective Philip Marlowe in the new movie Marlowe — a fiction looming large enough to fill a doorframe but also aged, with slightly stooped shoulders. Chandler’s outdated urban knight reappears as a figment of imagination from Irish director Neil Jordan. Marlowe suggests a memento hanging on a thin nostalgic thread.
Swinging between Altman’s satirical parody and Polanski’s terrifying tragedy, Marlowe cannot equal those classics, but Jordan pays homage to their aesthetic and moral reverberation — knowing what’s become of our wicked world and wishing our movies were better.
Jordan makes movies beautifully, but he also investigates myths. What reviewers wrongly praise about The Banshees of Inisherin has long been the substance of Jordan’s best-known films, Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, and Interview with the Vampire, all box office hits specifically dealing with cultural heritage and sexual eccentricity. But Jordan’s very best films (Breakfast on Pluto, Byzantium, The Butcher Boy, Ondine, The Company of Wolves) were sensual explorations of Irish thought and language. Now he presents Marlowe — once idealized by Humphrey Bogart in Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1945) — as a virtual Irish folk hero in this self-conscious Millennial reboot.
Set in 1930s Los Angeles, Marlowe (filmed in Europe, looking somewhat anomalous) gets its subtext from Jordan’s ethnic casting. Irish actor Neeson as Chandler’s fearless sleuth; Ian Hart and Colm Meaney as L.A. cops; Alan Cummings and Danny Huston as local crooks. The femme fatales are Irish former film actress Dorothy Cavendish (Jessica Lange) and her daughter Clare (Diane Kruger), a sexual and film-industry rival.
These characters make Marlowe personal for Jordan. He’s a protégé of visionary director John Boorman, and movies are central to his imagination. Hawks’s cherished melodrama of mid-20th-century sexual intrigue is reinterpreted in terms of the history and nomenclature of film noir; revealing not only the characters’ erotic drives but their sin-sick environment. This ’30s Hollywood is morally dubious, centered on the clash of power, sex, and other vices, seen through Jordan’s literary-cinematic sensibility. Clare, evoking the Old World county and a tarnished version of Saint Clare of Assisi, confers the genre’s ultimate, poetic judgment on the story’s villain: “Because he was far too young for me. Because he was evil incarnate. Because he was already dead.”
Jordan’s Catholic-manqué Marlowe is incomprehensible without prior knowledge of Hawks’s convoluted film (symbolized by Marlowe pursuing a victim-suspect through a labyrinthine mausoleum) and, especially, Altman’s Chandler update (starring Elliot Gould) and Polanski’s mix of both Chandler and Dashiell Hammett archetypes. So this is an art film. Jordan does literary puns on Christopher Marlowe and profane riffs on James Joyce. (Dorothy knew Joyce and recalls him as a literary thief and “syphilitic little man.”) This isn’t disrespect so much as a leveling. Marlowe is Jordan’s look at cultural cynicism, linking Joyce to Chandler and to the many Dr. Faustuses of Hollywood itself.
All Jordan can do is reexamine that heritage — sordid intimations of incest, Evelyn Mulwray’s blasted eye socket in Chinatown, Gould-Marlowe’s betrayed friendships — to signify our cultural decay more effectively than Damien Chazelle did in Babylon. Jordan arrives at the same moral juncture that Brian De Palma faced in The Black Dahlia, finding the essence of modern miasma in the delusions of Hollywood’s past. For an ethnic-focused film artist like Jordan, this would include new Hollywood’s race and gender hypocrisy.
Trendy, vapid Chazelle sentimentalized a token Mexican immigrant in Babylon, but Jordan and waggish co-screenwriter William Monahan, who scripted Scorsese’s The Departed, plays with ethnicity (those Irish mugs, Lange’s perfect brogue, and Cumming’s perfect Southern twang). Daring the same black/Irish tease of The Crying Game and Mona Lisa, Jordan effects a coup, inserting the experience of black chauffeur Cedric (British-Nigerian actor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Oz’s Adebisi), evoking both Native Son and A Raisin in the Sun. A burly outsider like Marlowe, Cedric knows the inside track, summing up Hollywood as “a city of motorized secrets.”
At first, the rapprochement of Marlowe and Cedric resembles the gimmicky violent bonding of Butch and Marsellus in Pulp Fiction. But because Jordan is a serious cinema aesthete, their brotherhood pinpoints Hollywood’s moral hypocrisy as it moved into World War II propaganda. Cedric looks at the backlot fakery of Nazi book-burning and daringly opines: “Still, that Leni Riefenstahl; she made some good movies, though.” It may be the ultimate clapback at modern Hollywood’s corrupt double standard. Detective Jordan rescues movie mythology.
