History and Film: The Black Dahlia

Just came back from watching. Overall, I liked it better than I was expecting to. If you forget the studio is trying to market it as a star-studded epic followup to LA Confidential and just treat it on its own terms, it works reasonably well. A few quick comments:

• Ellroy (and Friedman) were smart. The Dahlia murder (an actual event) is a framework, but this does not purport to be the "real" explanation of how it happened. (I saw a documentary last year on Ellroy, in which he -- drunk and BSing with some off-duty cops -- lays out what he thinks actually happened. This isn't it.) As a result, the writers can get away with a lot more dramatic tightness. For example, Ebert's Law of Economy of Characters winds up applying, without feeling overly forced. If this were more docudrama in feel, that might not have worked.
  
• In fact, DePalma and Friedman (and maybe Ellroy as well, I have to confess, I haven't read the book yet) go to great effort to make The Black Dahlia feel like a modern, historical version of The Big Sleep.
  
• The writers were also smart enough to avoid making the real story about the Dahlia murder. Yeah, it's there in the background, and it serves as a great MacGuffin, but the real story is more of a twisted love polygon (it would be spoiling to say how many sides, not to mention damned difficult).
  
• There's some deft expository work in the beginning, tying in a bond issue, which you would expect to be dry, and making it a catalyst for the rest of the story. Side note: what is it about Los Angeles-based noir and municipal policy? Chinatown has water policy at its heart, this has a bond issue for policemen. You wouldn't think these would work, but they do.
  
• Not really a storytelling point, but: Aaron Eckhart is great in this. Intense, haunted, full of rough energy. He makes the scenes he's in. Sadly, Hartnett, Johanssen and Swank seem to know they're in a Hollywood film. And that's really the problem with the movie overall -- it knows it's a big studio film. DePalma tries too hard to be serious and elegiac, and more often comes off as choreographed. Eckhart, though, knows enough to not quite keep the beat. Next to the rest of the performances, he feels almost syncopated, and that works well for him.