The Pale Blue Eye
Scott Cooper’s sixth feature is a handsome, perplexing murder mystery weighed down by a misplaced sense of its own importance.
Mist opportunity: Christian Bale
Just two weeks after one British actor has adopted the mantle of an American detective on Netflix, along comes another. But unlike Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc in Glass Onion, Christian Bale’s morose Augustus Landor is nowhere near as much fun. In fact, it’s hard to work out exactly what emotions Scott Cooper’s mystery-thriller is trying to elicit, other than complete bafflement. Adapted from the 2003 novel by Louis Bayard, the film is set in the winter of 1830 at the military academy of West Point in New York. It is there that a cadet has been found hanged from a tree and, once laid out in the morgue, has his heart removed by an unseen hand. Landor is called on by the superintendent of the Academy (Timothy Spall) to investigate the mystery, and as is the case with such military procedurals, one damned thing leads to another…
Christian Bale first worked with the director Scott Cooper on the absorbing and gritty Out of the Furnace (2013) and again on the even more compelling and brutal Hostiles (2017). Cooper is always good with atmosphere and realism and here doesn’t stint with his depiction of an isolated institution bordered by virgin woodland and the fast-flowing Hudson. He has a really good eye and with the aid of his DP, Masanobu Takayanagi, has created an authentic, almost Gothic palette for the strange events that unfold. On the downside, though, is the muddy soundtrack and droning score of Howard Shore, which refuses to leave the film alone.
More problematic is the plodding, lugubrious tone, sporadically dissipated by a bizarre turn from Gillian Anderson and a chunk of over-acting from a miscast Timothy Spall as the real-life Sylvanus Thayer. As Edgar Allan Poe, a second-year cadet and published poet, the London-born Harry Melling (The Queen's Gambit) has some fun with the language (“death is poetry’s most exalted theme”) and a love-struck manner. He is smitten with Lea (the London-raised Lucy Boynton), daughter of the good doctor played by Toby Jones (the good doctor in The Wonder). In fact, it’s a shock when Robert Duvall pops us and we remember that this is actually an American film, in spite of the presence of Bale, Boynton, Melling, Jones, Spall, Harry Lawtey and Charlotte Gainsbourg. And as overtones of the occult and Hammer horror start to raise their unseemly heads, a sense of high camp sends the whole thing into a kind of batty freefall.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Christian Bale, Harry Melling, Gillian Anderson, Lucy Boynton, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Toby Jones, Harry Lawtey, Simon McBurney, Fred Hechinger, Timothy Spall, Robert Duvall, Joey Brooks, Brennan Keel Cook, Orlagh Cassidy, Matt Helm, Charlie Tahan.
Dir Scott Cooper, Pro Scott Cooper, Christian Bale, John Lesher and Tyler Thompson, Screenplay Scott Cooper, from the novel by Louis Bayard, Ph Masanobu Takayanagi, Pro Des Stefania Cella, Ed Dylan Tichenor, Music Howard Shore, Costumes Kasia Walicka Maimone, Sound Chris Chae, Dialect coach Jessica Drake.
Cross Creek Pictures/Streamline Global Group/Le Grisbi Productions-Netflix.
128 mins. USA. 2023. UK and US Rel: 6 January 2023. Cert. 15.
