Mark Reviews Movies: MARLOWE (2023)

Marlowe, Open Road Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 14, 2023

Co-screenwriter/director Neil Jordan's Marlowe feels like a copy of an homage. We are now far enough removed from the post-war noir period and genre of filmmaking that Jordan's callback to the detective yarns of old arrives with little to say and even less inspiration for how to say it. The time for making nostalgic homages to the noir films of the 1940s and '50s seems to have passed about two decades ago, and while Jordan and co-writer William Monahan's screenplay gives us a hook that could have commented on and explored the idea of nostalgia expiring, this movie doesn't even take advantage of what's right in front of it.

The story here sees a return of sorts of author Raymond Chandler's private detective Philip Marlowe, most famously played by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep but also portrayed by actors as varied as Robert Mitchum (twice) and Elliott Gould (which should remind one that we're already about 50 years out from the concept of a neo-noir, which makes this, perhaps, a sort of neo-post-neo-noir in degree of attempted sincerity). This Marlowe is played by Liam Neeson as a private eye who refuses to acknowledge that he's past his prime—except when jokingly offers that old chestnut of a one-liner about being too old for this kind of stuff.

Jordan and Monahan, adapting John Banville's novel The Black-Eyed Blonde, want us to see this Marlowe in that way, yet the movie itself also seems to refuse to acknowledge its own premise. Their variation of Marlowe is no different in practice than any independent investigator of his ilk. He's still astutely observant and keenly aware of how people behave. He's still willing and able to drive around 1939 Los Angeles, hoofing it when necessary to sneak around in places he shouldn't be or underground dens where no one should have to find oneself. This Marlowe can even take down men a couple decades or more younger than him, although he uses a chair on one occasion to make sure the job his fists had been doing is finished.

If there's nothing unique about this older and just-as-active and still-perceptive Marlowe, what's really special about Jordan's movie? It can't simply be its sincerity to replicate the look and feel of an old noir, especially since Jordan shoots it in color and partially because the dialogue, with its quirks of rhythm and expression and repetition, sometimes comes across as a parody of the hard-nosed conversations we might expect from this kind of material. It's definitely not the plot, which revolves around a mysterious man who has mysteriously disappeared for reasons that, ultimately, don't end up being much of a mystery.

That the movie does take its generic and familiar plotting far too seriously is unfortunate, particularly because most of this story amounts to our not-so-different Marlowe talking to a bunch of characters about information that might reveal yet another clue. The plot-heavy approach means that neither the movie nor the main character provide much of a personality, which is a death sentence for material that so depends upon tone and atmosphere to carry us through the piecing together of some puzzle.

Instead, we watch Marlowe be hired by Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger), the beautiful and wealthy wife of a rather egregious red herring, whose lover, a prop master working for the movies, has gone missing. Soon enough, the man's body is found, with the head smashed under the tires of a speeding car (The gore and some colorful language add only a superficial key change to the self-imposed censorship of the decades-old era of filmmaking), but Clare is convinced he isn't dead.

This, of course, sends Marlowe around town to talk to and question assorted archetypes played by some familiar actors: Danny Huston as a conniving club owner, Alan Cumming as weaselly gangster, Jessica Lange as Clare's washed-up actress of a mother, and Colm Meaney as one of a couple police detectives who help Marlowe and expect his free-from-protocol hands to get dirty on occasion. Everyone here knows what they're supposed to do, which is to spout exposition with an air that's appropriate to broad characterization of their roles, and that's to say no one is expected to do much.

Ultimately, the prospect of Marlowe is far more enticing than the end result. It offers us nothing new, and the movie presents that familiarity in a fairly dull way.

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