Noir does not break bones – Newspaper Kommersant No. 33 (7478) of 02/27/2023

Neil Jordan’s “Marlowe” was released – the 100th picture in the filmography of the honored artist Liam Neeson. This time he tries on the wrinkled suit and fedora of the legendary private eye created by Raymond Chandler, but they sit on him, according to Julia Shagelman, exceptionally unsuccessful.

Philip Marlowe was born in 1939 in Raymond Chandler’s Deep Sleep, which became the beginning of a cycle of seven novels and several short stories. According to Chandler, the inspiration for Marlowe was not some real person, but the same “hard-boiled” detective stories of other authors, extremely popular in the 1930s and 1940s. Like them, Marlow, in the spirit of the times, drank and smoked a lot, kept meeting beautiful and dangerous women at work, whose charms he tried to resist, solved riddles, got into trouble, regularly got punched in the face and hid unshakable moral principles under the mask of a cynic. Unlike many of them, he also had a uniquely dry sense of humor and charisma that allowed him to become a cult character for years to come, even when the peak of the film noir genre was behind him.

His film career, of course, contributed to this: he appeared in a dozen films, the most famous of which are Howard Hawks’ Deep Sleep (1946), where Humphrey Bogart played the detective, Edward Dmytryk’s It’s Murder, My Darling (1944) with Dick Powell , “The Lady in the Lake” by Robert Montgomery (1946) with him in the title role and “Farewell, My Beauty” by Dick Richards (1975) with Robert Mitcham. In 1978, Mitcham returned to the role of Marlowe in the remake of The Deep Sleep of the same name directed by Michael Winner, which was set in modern, that is, seventies, London, and this was the famous detective’s last appearance on the big screen. Until last year, when Neil Jordan and Oscar-winning screenwriter William Monaghan decided to make a comeback.

The script, however, was based not on Chandler’s texts, but on the novel Black-Eyed Blonde by Irish writer John Banville, published in 2014, that is, in fact, authorized fan fiction. Perhaps that’s why the film is like a collection of not too well-performed “greatest hits”. All elements of the genre are ticked off like checkboxes on a shopping list: a missing man sought by several interested parties, a convoluted criminal scheme leading to the powers that be, sins lurking behind the doors of wealthy houses and elite clubs, cigarette smoke hanging in the air, and oblique the rays of the sun, illuminating every second mise-en-scène through half-closed blinds. There are two fatal blondes: one, the rich heiress Claire Cavendish (Diane Kruger), comes to Marlow (Liam Neeson) with a request to find her disappeared lover (Francois Arnault); the other, her mother and fading movie star Dorothy Quincannon (Jessica Lange), also has a keen interest in both lover and detective.

As for Marlow himself, despite the hat, the three-piece suit, the cigarette case, and so on, he is just another tough guy of retirement age, of which Neeson has outplayed an already frightening amount. Admittedly, the authors are aware that their hero is twice as old as the canonical one: he even says once that he is too old for this shit, and the ladies also do not miss the opportunity to let the hairpin on this matter. For all that, however, he scatters the bad guys so cheerfully that the original Chandler hero would only envy.

But everything in the film, including the protagonist, looks like a frozen display in a long-abandoned wax museum, further helped by the dusty yellow color scheme chosen by Jordan and his production designer. Obviously, it should create a retro feel, as well as evoke allusions, for example, with Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) – the authors clearly focus on it and on neo-noir in general more than on the black and white classics of the genre. But instead, you just want to wipe the screen with a cloth and return Boggy to it.