Review: the return of Marlowe
As a devoted lover of classic Hollywood cinema, I was tickled when I saw that there was to be a new movie about Philip Marlowe, writer Raymond Chandler’s private detective who scours far-flung corners of 1940s’ Los Angeles at the behest of doubtful and duplicitous clients in novels like The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, and Farewell, My Lovely. There’ve been big screen adaptations of each of those titles, sometimes several times over, and the glorified gumshoe has been portrayed by some of the medium’s most distinctive leading men, from Humphrey Bogart to Robert Mitchum to Danny Glover.
His latest incarnation assumes the form of Liam Neeson — and, to be honest, I feared that, as result, there’d been a certain Taken-ifying of Mr. Chandler’s creation. On the page, Philip Marlowe is a surly, grumbling worm of a man who hunches his back against the world, quick to observe yet even quicker to despise; as a whole, Mr. Neeson’s characters are known for translating personal irascibility to interpersonal headlocks or gut punches.
To my great surprise, Marlowe — which is co-written and directed by Neil Jordan, whose own style tends to lean towards the lurid — is a well-spoken, balanced regeneration of Chandler’s material. Yes, there are a few scenes where Neeson uses his fists to put the baddies in their place, but on the whole Mr. Jordan keeps the camera level, emphasizing conversation (his dialogue is deliberate, smart, if without the magic of past movies) in a manner that registers as sincere emulation or deference to a bygone era.
This has been a consistent marker of Marlowe adaptations through the years, dating all the way back to the Cold War. When a pre-Rockford Files James Garner assumed the role, in Paul Bogart’s Marlowe (‘69), he suavely identified himself to a villain’s henchman as “the last of a dying dynasty. King of the Fools. Unassailably virtuous — invariably broke.” Such a description applies to Elliot Gould’s portrayal in The Long Goodbye (‘73), too, even as director Robert Altman frames his shamus less as a tarnished knight than as a trampled knight’s page. (When offered a batch of brownies early in the film, Gould demurs, muttering through his cigarette: “Thanks a lot, but they hurt my teeth.”)
Mr. Jordan preserves this spirit of resignation, yet in casting Neeson he ages the character by a couple of decades — and in so doing, perhaps, dilutes any acid that might still be clinging to the corners of Marlowe’s mouth. There’s a sardonic puckishness running through earlier portrayals: from Bogart to Gould, Philip Marlowe is fussy, dry, downtempo. Both stony and joking — jumping through hoops to prove that he doesn’t care, only to find his hand shaking after firing a gun, or to look on with withering disappointment as a woman he likes is killed, or to hurl indignations at smug policemen as he stumbles into the indifferent night.
The new Marlowe breaks with tradition, wiping away urgency and desperation to present the character as something of an aged gentleman, a distinguished loner who opts to live outside convention while remaining resolutely conventional. In this way, it mirrors other recent negotiations of established yet tired crime-fighting crusaders, like James Bond (i.e., Skyfall) or Logan, and is emblematic of Hollywood’s knack for resurrecting conservative white male gatekeepers.
Of course, Neeson isn’t the only figure in this film’s lineup: Diane Kruger is studiously American as an heiress trying to locate her narcotics-pushing lover; Jessica Lange cuts her fangs as Kruger’s mother, a cougarish former film star; Danny Huston and Alan Cumming make fine turns as unscrupulous fiends in well-tailored suits; and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje plays a Tommy-touting chauffeur who strangely ends up scoring better than anyone else.
It’s fun to watch this ensemble riff, even if their elaborate verbal coiffures start to fray in the film’s closing scenes. Successful though Marlowe may be at honoring precedent, it also can’t identify a compelling reason for its own existence. Mr. Jordan has mounted a goodnatured tribute to gumshoe flicks of old, and diligently ferried Raymond Chandler’s antihero into the twenty-first century. Yet to what end? There’s nothing here that one won’t find with greater wit and style in Altman’s Long Goodbye, or in Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep. (“Why did you have to go on?” “Too many people told me to stop.”)
Is there a future for Philip Marlowe, or is his fate just as wobbly as that of cinema itself? Or, more to the point, is this idea of Marlowe really the one we want or need to see?
