The Pale Blue Eye (2022)

This review contains some Spoilers towards the end.

 

 The Pale Blue Eye is a beautifully-shot, thoughtfully-paced treatment of Louis Bayard's 2003 novel of the same name about Edgar Allan Poe's (fictional) involvement with a murder investigation as a cadet at the United States Military Academy in 1830. Shot against the backdrop of a rural New York winter, it progressively lays out of multiple threads of intrigue, all of which are treated seriously and with respect to the viewer's intelligence, and only falters in its attempt at resolving them in the film's final third. Retired detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is asked by the Academy's brass to investigate the recent desecration of a body of a cadet who had apparently committed suicide, and Landor soon meets Poe, played by Harry Melling as a morbid, naive youth with a sort of beatific expression on his face, and with an accent that, as an Australian, I don't feel qualified enough to comment on the authenticity of. Landor, whose motivations and past are presented ambiguously, takes something approaching a fatherly interest in Poe and recruits him to infiltrate a specific group of cadets whom he suspects as being involved in the dead cadet's mutilation, and possible murder. At the same time, the Captain (Simon McBurney) and Superintendent (Timothy Spall) of the Academy have a political interest in the case's quiet resolution - apparently several Senators would like to see it shut down - and put pressure on Landor to that effect. Another layer of complexity and ambiguity is presented by the Academy's coroner, Daniel Marquis (Toby Jones), whose initial collegiality with Landor is soon undermined by seeming mistakes made in his own inquest, and whose colorfully dysfunctional family raise Landor's suspicions. His daughter (Lucy Boynton) is in fragile health and becomes the object of desire of the morbid Poe, while Marquis's wife is mercurially eccentric and his son is part of the cadre which Poe is tasked with infiltrating.

Director Scott Cooper and cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi shot this film in a captivatingly tranquil and subdued palette. The Pale Blue Eye is filled with scenes of snow-adorned forests, wooden cabins nestled by the Hudson River producing smoke and flickering lights, cadets in dress uniform wandering stiffly about stone barracks, as well as a particularly evocative candlelit tavern. Many conversations take place inside some dark, brown wooden building or other over a table lit only by candles, and the effect is startling, giving an atmosphere close to something like fantasy. These conversations often delve into the more fantastical, spiritual elements of the plot, while the film is brought back into sharp relief when Landor squabbles with the Captain and Superintendent in the coolly-lit, cavernous, not-quite-sterile government buildings of the Academy. Many of the actors, including Bale, accentuate these aspects of the film's aesthetic through underacting, some of the cadets almost whimpering their lines. Others, such Melling or Spall, deliver more expressive, mannered performances, with mixed results.

 Melling's eccentric interpretation of Bayard's interpretation of Poe is fun to begin with, and plays off Bale's underacting nicely, but - like the film as a whole - he struggles to use this framing of his character to get at the man that lies underneath. Poe has many entertaining intellectual conversations with Landor and others about poetry and death, and alongside his naivety and foppishness this provides an intriguing portrait of a sort of clueless literary outsider, incongruously compelled to train as a soldier. (In many respects, not in the least being his accent, the person Melling's Poe reminds me most of is the American political commentator Nathan J. Robinson). But, though he may explain to Lea Marquis that he believes death to be "poetry's most exulted theme," no rationale for this belief pierces his veneer of naivety, and that he is naive and wholesome at his core is demonstrated in the final third of the film (more on this later). His seeming compulsion to disclose upon meeting new people that he is regularly visited and guided by the ghost of his mother provokes some interesting reactions (in a brilliant scene, Lea stifles a laugh that could be either nervous, mocking or both upon hearing this, but seems to become fascinated with him soon after), and the ambiguity behind this in the context of the film adds a layer of depth to scenes where he or Landor wander through thick mist in the night, or the dark empty halls of the barracks. However, for all the (highly welcome) conversations about ideas, conflicting opinions on the role of poetry and national identity, Poe, through his actions, becomes shallower in line with the plot as it develops, and the motivations for his actions do not imply much more than the surface characterisation established earlier - of a weird-looking, put-upon intellectual twenty-something youth, out of his element, naive and possibly delusional, but with few hidden depths. By the end of the film it almost feels like an affected kookiness.

Landor is in the standard mould of the troubled outsider with a murky past, much like a classic Clint Eastwood role, and like Eastwood Bale uses the part as an opportunity to play to his strengths as a known quantity. Landor is moody, quietly acerbic, strangely serene, at times temperamental and arrogant but also sympathetic, with a sense of conviction. Bale handles all of this well and is magnetic enough to elevate the material, and the writing itself - for all of the characters in the first half of the film - is kept just ambiguous enough to hint at broader, unspoken relations and forces between them in the background of the plot. In many conversations you're never completely sure what either character is thinking, or what each thinks of the other, the sense of intrigue deepening with each scene. This ambiguity also applies to the ideas that the film seems interested in exploring - a man hangs himself in a military institution, but is also mutilated, and a cover-up is indicated but never explicitly stated as a suspicion; ghosts may or may not exist, and cult activity concerned with communicating with the Devil may just be a fascination with death not unlike that afflicting Poe, or it may have some sinister material basis; there are a few interesting overt discussions about religion and faith itself, its relevance and effectiveness.

However, for reasons best known to Scott Cooper (who wrote the screenplay), this layering of plot and characterisation and ambiguity is abandoned in the final third of the film, and the complex, shrouded motivations behind each characters' actions established earlier are each spelled out and resolved as if according to a set timeline. Mayber Cooper just got bored, perhaps there was some pressure from the studio to provide a quick, comprehensible solution. The narrative thread with Marquis family culminate in a scene where someone knocks over a candle, two major characters perish in the resulting fire and Landor has to hold Poe back from rushing into the flames himself. Does this sound familiar? This lends credence to the idea that Cooper either got bored or struggled to find a way to write the scene (or that Bayard faced the same dilemma) and instead drew straight from the Hollywood screenwriter book of forms to solve this problem (perhaps a deadline). This comes up again when Landor's motivations are explicitly spelled out in the film's final act. Not to put too fine a point on it, but he's presented as troubled and volatile because his daughter was raped by a group of cadets and commits suicide. There are a couple of problems with this: one, as other critics have pointed out, this is something of a sexist cliche - a male character's aggrievement based on sexual violence directed towards a woman he's responsible for; another being that it reductively implies that his character traits have to be based on a specific act he's experienced divorced from other elements of the film's context. In the final third of the film Landon does have a run-in with the Captain and Superintendent, and explains his moral and ethical objections to the Academy in the way that it takes away "a young man's will, [...] fences him with regulations and rules, deprives him of reason, [and] makes him less human." This, however, is quickly forgotten, and any lingering hostility is dissolved in later scenes at the conclusion of the investigation. 

To compare another moody fictional detective, Clint Eastwood's Harry Callahan's hostility to his superiors draws from a much deeper well - evidence is given for it, including his own mistreatment by the police force, personal tragedy in the line of work, his exhaustion with the job, and a more general, less easily articulated problem with authority and with himself. This makes the character and the films (particularly the first Dirty Harry) more involving to watch, and he comes across as more real and more nuanced as a consequence. His problems are never fully accounted for or resolved, and he remains mired in them, we only learn more about them and him during the course of the film. Christian Bale's Augustus Landor, however, is wrapped up neatly along with the plot. I don't think any loose ends after left by the film's conclusion - if there were any they would probably stand out as plot holes. Landor is even symbolically absolved of his sins by Poe burning his confession with a candle. Poe's own complexity is severely diluted through his display of moral outrage at Landor's crimes. One would think a morbidly inclined young intellectual like him would at least weigh up the morality of murder against the culpability of the institution of the military, which had so abused him as well, in the rape of Landor's daughter. But there is no discussion or argument about this, and Landor embraces Poe's naivety rather than pushing back against it. The screenwriting conventions used to paper over this feel familiar as well.

This isn't meant to be a complete takedown of the film. The Pale Blue Eye is still (in parts) a very well-made, intelligent, thoughtful murder-mystery, beautifully shot and with what seems to be rich attention to historical detail. It's much more interesting than Glass Onion, and I hope more films like it will be made. But I also hope that if other directors decide to make a similarly complicated literary adaption that they commit to it, and they expand the parameters of the narrative world at the film's conclusion rather than narrowing it.