Mark Reviews Movies: THE PALE BLUE EYE

The Pale Blue Eye, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 22, 2022

One of those pieces of literary trivia is that, while Arthur Conan Doyle may have popularized the modern detective story, Edgar Allan Poe most likely originated it. The Pale Blue Eye, writer/director Scott Cooper's adaptation of Louis Bayard's novel, starts with a pretty solid, if unstated, assumption: Poe must have known or at least encountered such a detective to inspire those fictional tales of deduction.

The question, then, is such: Is this a story about Poe, or is it a tale about said detective? Cooper makes it both, which is fine considering that the two characters have different purposes, methods, and personalities as they try to uncover who is killing cadets at the military academy at West Point. The problem, perhaps, is that Poe is a far more intriguing and engaging character than the man doing most of the investigative work.

He's Augustus Landor (Christian Bale), a sad and lonely man living in an isolated cottage near the academy. While he has a military record, Landor's reputation of late comes from his work as a kind of consulting detective, helping the police to solve various and mysterious crimes.

The case that pulls him out of his self-imposed hermitage, living a solitary life as a widower and the father of a daughter who has left him, involves a dead cadet at the academy. A fellow classmate finds the young man's body hanged by the neck from a tree, and while the initial ruling is suicide, there's a hitch in that assumption: The man was found almost crouching, meaning his feet were on the ground while the noose was around his neck.

Landor's story is pretty rudimentary. He's called in by the academy's superintendent Thayer (Timothy Spall) to investigate the circumstances of the death, to find a motive and a suspect if the case is one of murder, and to put an end to this nasty business before West Point can be shut down as certain officials in Washington, D.C., are scrambling to do. With some help from the academy's doctor David Marquis (Toby Jones) and his own skills, Landor discovers the victim was struck in the back of the head before suffocating, so he's definitely looking for a murderer.

As for the famous-writer-in-the-making, he's currently a cadet at West Point, just as the real Poe was in 1830, when this story is set. Landor just happens to encounter the sad, lonely young man at the local tavern, where he makes a regular custom of drinking glass after glass to dim the dark thoughts, as he more or less puts it. For a mind this morbid, though, there is no dimming thoughts of death and despair and loneliness.

Poe here is played by Harry Melling, in a perfect piece of casting—not only because the actor looks so eerily like Poe (Is there any other way to look like the man?), particularly in the sunken gloom of his eyes, but also because the precise finesse of his performance. His Poe doesn't simply mope around with the weight of depressing thoughts and an air mixing creepiness and melancholy. There's a darkly gleeful joy beneath his ability to channel those thoughts into something useful—in this scenario, aiding Landor in his investigation—or creative—since he is writing, although not regularly, at the time of this tale. When he meets and falls for the doctor's daughter Lea (Lucy Boynton) while looking into particular cadets (including the doctor's son Artemus, played by Harry Lawtey), we also get a hint of some hopeless romanticism.

There are two different stories playing out within Cooper's screenplay—a fact solidified, really, by the existence of two separate endings, each of which makes one of the two main characters the focus, and conclusions to the same mystery. One belongs to Landor, who follows different leads, clues, and suspects toward the identity of a likely killer or killers. That most of his detective work almost seems to occur completely by accident or coincidence is explained or, at least, rationalized, as the mystery finally—as in with a long pause between one solution and the next—unravels, by the plot. It still doesn't make the character or his haphazard way of deduction particularly engaging, no matter how weary and moody Bale may be in this role.

That leaves Poe, who does so much of the legwork and questioning once he becomes involved that Landor's character starts to feel extraneous. He's a far more worthwhile character—partly because of the novelty of seeing a historical figure in this light, partly because of the way Cooper fleshes out the man's mood and details of his biography, mostly because of Melling's full commitment to bringing all of that to life.

While the course of Landor's investigation brings him toward matters of the macabre and the occult (again suggesting some early inspiration for Poe's later oeuvre), Poe's ultimate discoveries lead him toward the darker elements of human nature and a moral dilemma. Everything in The Pale Blue Eye points toward Poe being the real and far more intriguing protagonist of this story, except the movie itself. It's torn between these two men and, more importantly, whether it's actually about the unsettling ideas its plot raises or just using those ideas as a way to shock and surprise us at the last minute.

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