Bearded and frowning, Christian Bale investigates a series of horrible murders and enlists the services of a young student: Edgar Allan Poe. Not so fantastic…
While the murder mystery invades theaters, platforms and even TV (it goes from Glass Onion to Death on the Nile or Coup de theater and we are waiting for the next series of Rian Johnson, Poker Face) one would have thought that it would be fun to launch on the traces of a terrible murder the very father of the genre: Edgar Allan Poe. Unfortunately, Scott Cooper doesn’t go that far. In The Pale Blue Eye the writer of Double murder in the Rue Morgue (embodied to perfection by Harry Melling, Harry Potter’s Dudley Dursey) is only the sidekick (assistant and quickly main suspect) of the real investigator Augustus Landor played by Christian Bale.
Landor, an inconsolable widower whose daughter recently ran away, is hired by West Point Military Academy to find the murderer of a school cadet. A student was found hanged with his heart torn out. We are around 1830. It snows a lot in New York State. Landor, with his threadbare gabardine, crooked top hat, lumberjack beard and brash phlegm, looks like an ancestor of the privateers who would roam the avenues of LA more than a hundred years later. He has the look, the mysterious melancholy, the desperate alcoholism and the power of deduction. Quickly, while surveying the campus of the Military Academy, he meets Edgar Poe, a young romantic student, who therefore offers him his help and his brilliant intuitions.
From there, the film sinks into a murky fantasy territory and multiplies wacky twists or wobbly coincidences, advancing the plot in a totally erratic way until a climax as bloody as it is grotesque. Cooper is clearly on the trail of Burton (that of Sleepy Hollow) and dreams of a disheveled magician of dreams, sliding on the thick and black waters of the collective unconscious and creepy fantasies.
This is what Landor very passively embodies, who only listens to Poe’s presciences, meets the strange couple formed by a doctor and his mysterious wife (played excessively by Toby Jones and a Gillian Anderson with filthy teeth ), an expert in occultism (Robert Duvall, who decided to stay seated on this one) and a sexy innkeeper (Charlotte Gainsbourg who plays lying down). But at the end of his trip? Not much: under his gothic tinsel, behind the nods to the work of Poe (we are entitled to a croaking crow and the recitation of poems) the filmmaker does not produce anything exciting.
Fairly well wrapped (the photo of Masanobu Takayanagi between the winter exteriors, the warmer interiors and the Gothic atmosphere is sumptuous), the film is actually lost in a second part preposterous: neither tale, nor allegory, nor real investigation, The Pale Blue Eye therefore fails to find its subject (existential loneliness? Faith once morest reason? A criticism of the rigorous and very conservative military education?) and one must be satisfied with the performances of actors. Bale is equal to himself, Melling composes a Poe that is both fragile and confident, ambiguous, and Gillian Anderson has fun playing the (f)rigid and slightly crazy wife. For those who want gothic fantasy, Poe and stars, all in an extravagant setting, we recommend the fabulous Roger Corman box set recently released by Sidonis.
