Marlowe: Director Neil Jordan’s Irish-ification of Raymond Chandler A Big Snooze

By Liam Lacey

Rating: C

Though it’s set in Los Angeles in 1939, the movie Marlowe represents the Irish-ification of novelist Raymond Chandler’s quintessential Los Angeles detective, Philip Marlowe.

The film is based on the novel The Black-Eyed Blonde by the literary Irish author John Banville, writing under the pseudonym Benjamin Black in a book commissioned by Chandler estate. The director is Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) and the star, Liam Neeson. Another Irish actor, Colm Meaney, pops up as Marlowe’s friend and source, the Los Angeles police investigator Bernie Ohls.

The Irish connection to Chandler is not entirely artificial. Chandler, American-born and raised in England, had an Irish mother, and spent childhood summers in Waterford. Director Jordan has been influenced by Hollywood melodramas from the thirties and forties — the era where Chandler worked as a screenwriter. That was especially true in Jordan’s first film, 1982’s Angel. One might hope the team could add some Irish spring to the weary footsteps of the L.A. detective.

Jordan is not the primary screenwriter here, though he did some adapting of the script. The primary writer is an American, William Monahan (The Departed), and for the first half of the film, he shuffles us through film noir scenes that feel familiar to the point of ritual.

With Dublin and Barcelona filling in for the Los Angeles fictional district of “Bay City” with a yellow-filtered lens suggesting the jaundiced past, we meet an already world-weary Marlowe. He wakes up on top of the covers of his bed, moves some pieces around on his chessboard.

Later, in his dusty office, a woman client makes a cold call. She’s a wealthy blond heiress, Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger) who smokes his cigarettes, flirts with him, and says she’s looking for a missing lover, a small-time Hollywood hustler called Nico Peterson (François Arnaud). And what of Mr. Cavendish? They have an understanding, she explains.

What follows is a typically convoluted plot, in which Marlowe drinks habitually, visits various swanky and low-life places, gets knocked out, exposes high-level corruption, and eventually summons the moral outrage to solve the case.

The first half of the movie is a series of character introductions. The English actor Ian Hart plays Joe Green, an L.A. cop speaking in “dese and dose” patter, who gives Marlowe the word that Nico may have been killed in a hit and run.

There’s Danny Huston as a well-dressed thug who manages an exclusive club, near where the hit-and-run supposedly occurred. Alan Cumming camps it up as a sleazy gangster with a molasses southern drawl and Jessica Lang plays Clare’s fearsome mother, an Irish horsey-set type and former movie star.

As you go through this procession of venal eccentrics, you wait in vain for some spark of Chandler panache. The insolence! The romanticism! The fussy connoisseurship! Those famous similes (i.e. “He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.”). But there’s nothing here that sparks surprise. The film remains mechanical and stilted, like some grim combination of taxidermy and ventriloquism.

One might have hoped that Neeson would be challenged by the character Marlowe, the smart-ass knight, memorably played over the years by Humphrey Bogart, Elliot Gould, and Robert Mitchum. Instead, Neeson’s Marlowe — his 100th movie role — plays yet another version of his character in Taken, a stoical, narrowly focused man who, in brief flurries, can take out four or five goons half his age, adding, as he breaks a chair over one’s back, “I’m getting too old for this.”

To be fair, the film’s final third, with its disorienting neon-lit interiors, doesn’t feel entirely rote, just confusing. The emergence of Cedric (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), a gangster’s muscle man, chauffeur and Marlowe ally, adds some fizz to the mix. But it’s a case of much too little, way too late.

Marlowe. Directed by Neil Jordan. Starring Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, Jessica Lang, Danny Huston, Adewqale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Colm Meaney, Ian Hart, and Alan Cumming. Now playing in theatres.