|
THE
SINGING DETECTIVE Rating:  (out of 5 stars)Director: Keith Gordon Producers: Mel Gibson, Steve Haft, Bruce Havey Writer: Dennis Potter Director Of Photography: Tom Richmond Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Mel Gibson, Robin Wright Penn, Jeremy Northam, Katie Holmes, Carla Gugino, Adrian Brody, Alfre Woodard Visit the IMDB page for full cast and crew |
 Click on the photo to buy merchandise from The Singing Detective. |
The Singing Detective was, I've heard, a great miniseries (airing on the BBC and PBS in 1986). New York Times critic Vincent Canby called it "the year's best film." My father called it the best thing he'd ever seen.
Having only seen the new movie version, I wonder if it wasn't better suited for the 6-hour format, with a week between each hour so we could ponder its meaning. This material is so complex -- as director Keith Gordon told the NYT, it's ''your basic comedy-drama surrealist 1950's lip-synching rock 'n' roll musical absurdist expressionist film-noir pastiche naturalist character study" -- that by halfway through it still hadn't quite registered. I was more intrigued than engaged.
The story involves (and often takes place in) the mind of Dan Dark (Robert Downey Jr.), who writes clichéd detective stories when he can write at all. He suffers from psoriatic arthropathy, a crippling skin condition that leaves him all but paralyzed by anger and self-pity. Early scenes are hard to watch -- this is one horrible skin condition, and Downey isn't shy about making us feel it.
He understandably seeks refuge in fantasy, which (helped along by fever and pain medication) soon encroaches on what little reality he can stand. Before long he (and we) are in the world of his novel, The Singing Detective, in which 1950's private eye Dan Dark (Downey, without the scabs) does his thing -- taking no guff from gangsters and no lip from dames. He also sings in a rock'n'roll band.
The tone shifts as wildly as Dark's frame of mind. The 1950's scenes of his imagination are stylized noir as comedy -- Det. Dark spits P.I. gibberish in a clipped mumble, cigarette dangling. He outwits goons straight from central casting (Jon Polito and Adrian Brody -- casting in this movie is upscale). He takes on some kind of case, and women get murdered, though I couldn't tell you quite how or why.
But then he must keep returning to his real self, a cranky loser in a hospital bed. He refuses any compassion, even from the likes of Katie Holmes and Alfre Woodard (his nurses) and Robin Wright Penn (his truly implausible ex-wife). He rebuffs the hospital psychiatrist, a balding and soft-spoken man played by Mel Gibson in a bizarre performance that will dismay balding, soft-spoken character actors all over town. (I can hear it now, the guy who plays Toby on The West Wing, mumbling angry but stoic protest.)
Eventually though, Dark talks to the shrink and re-opens his past, treating us to, yes, childhood flashbacks. His various states of being -- real and fictional, past and present -- weave in and out of each other, and we start to see how the pieces fit. The whole "traumatic event from his past coloring his attitude toward women" notion is of course overly simple -- and thank God! Once I grasped the concept, the movie picked up steam. The final half-hour comes together well, with the manic but smart rhythm that earlier scenes hadn't quite hit.
Downey is sensational. He's got a big, broad, crazy role here and plays it to the hilt. It's not easy to be expressive when buried in scabby makeup, or to be sympathetic when playing a jerk, or to not look ridiculous when lip-synching to 1950's rock'n'roll, and on two of three counts he passes with flying colors. The lip-synching, and his whole P.I. persona, is performed with utter confidence, like he knows just what the hell is going on. It's hard to imagine anyone else pulling it off.
The director, former actor Keith Gordon (best known as Rodney Dangerfield's son in Back To School), was faced with a similar challenge. Dennis Potter's script (he also wrote the miniseries) is so inventive and ambitious that, as a viewer, I felt detached from it, like I was watching ideas in play more than characters. Worse, I'm not sure what many of those ideas actually are. Dark's real-life and memories are better realized than his stylized '50's world.
I've heard that in the miniseries it was a 1940's world, in England rather than Los Angeles, and the detective was more a crooner than rocker. According to the press notes, these changes are -- ahem -- not by accident. Potter saw the film version as "about America's postwar transition to rock and roll, to a fast-paced lifestyle, to a flashy, hedonistic surface covering a deeply troubled, xenophobic, confused, and slightly isolated soul." And if we were confused already…
This movie may have outsmarted itself,
but I like the energy, and admire the filmmakers' bravery. Downey
is brilliant, and the final half-hour is really something. Even
at its most bewildering, The Singing Detective has style
to spare.
(A Paramount Classics release. Opens in New York and Los Angeles
on October 24, 2003. Expands to more cities at later dates.)
|
|
|
|
|