True Confessions

This movie, a kind of behind-the-scenes look at the machinations and repercussions of the Black Dahlia murder in Los Angeles in 1948, stars Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall, two of my and everyone's all-time favorites, and was written by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. So why is it so bad?

Briefly, the movie is not about the investigation or the crime - it is about two brothers caught on either side of it, one an ambitious monsignor who has been raising money for the church (DeNiro) by working with Jack Amsterdam, the dirty boss of Los Angeles, and one a corrupt LAPD detective who used to be in Jack Amsterdam's pocket and no longer is (Du Vall). The bad brother ends up ruining the good brother when he takes down a bad man. It's a wonderful irony and one that could have made a great movie but the problem is this: the movie centers around the investigation of a crime but doesn't depict it, so the moments of suspense fall flat because we don't have enough context to be able to do the guessing and double-guessing that make thrillers thrilling. The movie is like a long piece of New Journalism about a murder, made for an audience that wasn't reading the details in the dailies. After it was over, I wanted to google the details of the Black Dahlia murder.

I want to blame someone other than Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne for the screenplay. And in the general Culture of Creative Irresponsibility of Studio Pictures (perhaps the subject of another post in the future), it is always an option to assume that the screenwriter wrote something brilliant that was then diced up and reshaped into something not brilliant, but it is also true that the list of bad movies written by great prose writers and awesome couples is long - and whatever the reasons, I think this movie belongs on that list. As Didion-Dunne screenwriting collaborations so, I prefer Up Close and Personal.