By Michael Marano

This is a Marlowe movie trying too hard to be a Marlowe movie. But it doesn’t have the heart to succeed.

Marlowe, directed by Neil Jordan. Screening at AMC Assembly Row 12, AMC Boston Common 19, and other cinemas throughout New England.

Diane Kruger and Liam Neeson in a scene from Marlowe. Photo: Open Door Films

Neil Jordan’s Marlowe is a mystery film in which the titular private eye takes on a missing person case. The real mystery of Marlowe is how Phil Marlowe himself is missing from the story.

The pedigree of this movie is faultless, which makes its profound failures all the more bewildering. Neil Jordan, himself a novelist, is a genius at capturing the mood, tone, and themes of other writers on screen, especially if the essence of those writers’ moods, tones, and themes seem to be, on the surface, unfilmable. He caught the weirdness of Angela Carter in The Company of Wolves, the nasty anger of Patrick McCabe in The Butcher Boy, and even though it’s not a good movie, he did a grand job of portraying the “romantic weltschmerz” of Anne Rice in Interview with the Vampire. And with The Crying Game, it goes without saying that Jordan can do noir with the best of ’em.

Boston’s own William Monahan, Oscar-winner for The Departed, adapted the screenplay from Booker Prize-winner John Banville’s novel, The Black-Eyed Blonde, which was licensed by the Chandler estate and published under Banville’s pseudonym, Benjamin Black.

How did Marlowe go so astoundingly wrong?

I said that Phil Marlowe was missing from the movie.

But that’s maybe only one-third true.

Yeah, there’s a tough private dick in the movie named Marlowe, here played in an old, leathery iteration by Liam Neeson. But Marlowe’s presence is incomplete without two other factors: the “I” with which Marlowe narrates his stories, and the city of Los Angeles, which itself needs to be fleshed out as an impossibly corrupt and dangerous character, an amoral foil to Marlowe’s sense of honor and code of conduct.

The Phil Marlowe of Jordan’s Marlowe isn’t the narrator of the story. He’s just the guy in the story. He’s not Dick Powell’s Marlowe, talking about breaking open the office bottle in Murder, My Sweet. He’s not Bogey’s Marlowe, clapping his eyes, along with the audience’s, for the first time on Lauren Bacall’s Vivian Rutledge in The Big Sleep. He’s not even Elliot Gould’s Marlowe, our kinda normal stand-in navigating the nutzoid, polyester hellscape that was the Southern California of the early ’70s in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. Even when there is no voice over, a Phil Marlowe story must be told by Marlowe, a conceit probably taken to an absurd extreme in Robert Montgomery’s The Lady in the Lake, which was filmed from the detective’s point of view. The viewer only sees Marlowe (in the form of Montgomery) when he passes in front of a mirror.

What’s more, the force that drives Marlowe to tell his story has to be the moral void, chockablock with barely repressed violence, that is L.A. Neeson and Jordan’s take on Marlowe has no “I” behind it, and Jordan’s L.A. (here filmed with Dublin and Barcelona standing in for the City of Angels) is far too slick and clean — despite the appalling, used-diaper-and-stale-Pez-candy color palette Jordan chose. Chandler’s L.A. could easily mutate into the L.A. of Blade Runner. Jordan’s L.A. could only mutate into a strip mall with two Starbucks and a hot yoga studio.

The most exquisite distillation of the Marlowe/L.A. dichotomy can be found in the opening of Chandler’s story “Red Wind,” the oft-quoted:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.

Jordan and Neeson’s Marlowe couldn’t articulate that kind of animated menace because the L.A. of Marlowe isn’t a character. It’s just a backdrop.

The plot of Marlowe is kind of negligible. Which is fine, or course. Famously, Chandler himself was so unconcerned with plot that he had “no idea” who committed one of the murders in The Big Sleep. Swell-lookin’ (and married) dame Diane Kruger hires Marlowe to find her missing lothario of a lover, which leads to entanglements with the Hollywood studio system and with bad people trafficking in bad things. Along the way, the talents of some incredible actors who were born to be in noir movies like this are wasted. Who doesn’t want to see Jessica Lange doing a full Norma Desmond as a fading star of the Silent Era? Who doesn’t want to see Alan Cumming as an evil hobbit of a gangster, hopped up on, if not bennies, then on his own intoxicating shittiness as a human being? Who doesn’t want to see Danny Huston claiming his legacy, playing an entitled, wealthy L.A. scumwad in a period film as a homage to the soulless villain his dad played in Chinatown?

This is a Marlowe movie trying too hard to be a Marlowe movie. But it doesn’t have the heart to succeed. Much lip service is given to the disillusionment of guys (like Chandler and Marlowe) who’d fought in WWI, but we don’t feel their terminal distress. We’re told about Marlowe’s code of ethics: one character explicitly talks to Marlowe about his “Sir Lancelot bullshit” and how he has no “regular self-interest anyone can count on.” But our noses are not rubbed in the jadedness that compels Marlowe to cling to those ethics.

Ultimately, Marlowe isn’t jaded, it’s arch. And “arch” cleverness is the very kind of thing for which Chandler’s Marlowe had no patience. Just take a look at the last chapter of The Little Sister if you don’t believe me. Yeah, that was arch cleverness as it related to a murder, not a movie. But in Chandler’s L.A., murder and the movie business are kind of the same thing. Marlowe is as devoid of substance as the hollowed-out people — flavorless as watered-down hooch in a Bay City dive bar — who populate Chandler’s fiction.

Novelist, writing coach, editor and film critic Michael Marano‘s favorite Chandler novels are either the aforementioned The Little Sister or Farewell, My Lovely, depending on the day of the week. www.GetOffMyLawn.Biz