I watched The Black Dahlia, for some reason. That wasn't a great idea.

The Black Dahlia is my least favorite of James Ellroy's novels, but I still walked away with at least a cautious affection for the book. De Palma's adaptation was one of those rare film adaptations that manages to highlight a book's weaknesses so brilliantly, while squashing its charms so ruthlessly, that it actually diminished my affection for the book.

I knew going in that the film had a reputation for being as long and charmless as any February afternoon, but I didn't know that it was going to try so hard to capture the most enervating and jejune obsessions and morbidities of Ellroy's early career. De Palma seems to think that Ellroy's genius is in his ability to invent twisted, perverse scenarios and characters with fractured personalities ruled by fetishes and compulsions. Really, it's Ellroy's genius as a writer of pure prose and hardboiled dialogue that makes him so compelling. The more twisted stuff, especially in Ellroy's early work, is something the reader is willing to put up with because Ellroy is so talented. Later in his career, through experience and good editors, Ellroy learned how to show a glimpse or two of the profane without giving the game away, but in his earlier works the voyeuristic and violently sexual fixations of the writer tend to test the reader's patience.

The three most tiresome features of Ellroy's novel--the sexual obsessions, his total inability to write an interesting female character (he overcompensates by trying to make every female character outlandish and dangerous), and his reliance on bizarre conspiracies and implausible coincidences--come out loud, clear, and hideous in the film. The longer the film runs, the more it becomes apparent just how hard it is to give a damn about any of the characters.

Occasionally striking visual imagery and nostalgic nods at long lost Los Angeles can't possibly compensate for the film's weaknesses. At most, the too brief moments of stark, bleak beauty, and the aching romance of Chandler era L.A. provide a brief respite which is always interrupted by somebody doing or saying something. Any time anybody does or says something in this film, it turns into a travesty. If you strung all the pretty visual moments together while playing a Flux of the Pink Indians or Jawbreaker song, you'd have something. Show a shiny silver Volvo driving in the foreground and you'd have a hell of a nice car commercial. But then the minute Johansson or Eckhart showed up on screen and said something, you'd feel the sudden urge to buy a Saab.

It makes me think back on elements of the book I really liked--the L'homme qui rit subplot, for instance, and the character of Emmett Linscott--and wonder just how in the hell it all managed to hold together. The parts of the book I always knew were ridiculous, like Maddie Linscott passing herself off as the Dahlia, are amplified from "problematic and mildly embarrassing" to "catastrophic failures."

As so often happens in bad crime films, the violent scenes are the most boring and the plot points are unintentionally hilarious.

Hartnett is passable as Bleichert because he has the right look and attitude to pull off "neo-noir protagonist" (although he bears little if any resemblance to the awkward street tough of the novel). Scarlett Johansson is unendurable as Kay, though that isn't entirely her fault given the script she had to work with. Still, in detective stories, there is always a fine line between playing the heroine like a pulp femme or a comic book damsel, and Johansson consistently makes the worst possible choice in any given scene. Hilary Swank chews scenery as Madeline Linscott, but she's downright subtle compared to Fiona Shaw who stumbles through the role of Ramona Linscott with the nuance of a meth addled drag queen doing an impression of Bette Davis. Patrick Fischler, meanwhile, has wandered in from a Dick Tracy strip to fuck up the role of Ellis Loew beyond recognition.

I had low expectations for the movie going in, but I had no idea just how badly it was all going to get fucked up. Unlikable and uninteresting characters doing inexplicable and implausible things to advance an incoherent plot that swells to an unwatchable denouement. Given that the movie is a couple of years old and widely reviewed, I knew what I was getting into, and kvetching about it is a little like going to the Bagel Festival in beautiful Mattoon, Illinois, and complaining about all the bagels and bagel-related products. Nothing had prepared me sufficiently, though, for this wonderland of piss poor performances combined with an unendurable story.