REVIEW: William Monahan, who won an Oscar for 'The Departed,' penned the script for director Neil Jordan’s noir pastiche, 'Marlowe.'
The last time we saw Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe onscreen, the perpetually broke and lonely private eye had married an heiress and moved to a swanky suburb. HBO’s 1998 “Poodle Springs,” directed by Bob Rafelson and starring James Caan as the sarcastic shamus, was adapted by playwright Tom Stoppard from Chandler’s unfinished final novel and found our hardscrabble hero ill-suited for domestic life.
“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid,” Chandler famously explained, “He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.” The character’s scruffy nobility has been embodied on the big screen over the decades by Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Dick Powell and James Garner with a romanticism that resists modernization.
“Marlowe” is based not on one of Chandler’s original stories but rather 2014’s “The Black-Eyed Blonde,” which Irish novelist John Banville wrote as a not-unconvincing exercise in literary ventriloquism under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. The story is a knowing pastiche of nifty noir setups and double-crosses, adapted by director Jordan and Boston’s own William Monahan as a primo opportunity for actors to spit hard-boiled dialogue in each other’s faces.
The director should be a fine fit for the material, as his 1986 classic “Mona Lisa'' was one of the key films of that decade’s neo-noir revival, and his delightful 2002 “The Good Thief” starred a similarly chivalric Nick Nolte in a sly reworking of Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Bob le Flambeur.” Yet some of Jordan's staging here borders on the surreal.
“Marlowe'' is being advertised as Liam Neeson’s 100th film. I haven’t checked the numbers, but I’d believe you if you told me it was his 100th since “Taken.” As much fun as it was at first to watch an Oscar-nominated, acclaimed thespian confound everybody’s expectations with a mid-career shift into Charles Bronson territory, 15 years of trashy action films have clearly taken their toll on Neeson.
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