Marlowe Review: Neil Jordan’s Noir Pastiche Starring Liam Neeson Is a Tall Order

The film is so riddled with noir clichés that one may initially take it for a genre parody.

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Marlowe
Photo: Open Road Films

Neil Jordan’s Marlowe is an homage so riddled with noir clichés that one may initially take it for a genre parody, except that the jokes never arrive. Think Carl Reiner’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid played straight and you’re closer to Marlowe than you should be.

Liam Neeson plays Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s famously lonely, authority-averse private detective, who’s been immortalized on screen by Humphrey Bogart, Elliott Gould, and Robert Mitchum. And the contrast between Bogart and Gould’s takes on the character is especially instructive for showing how Marlowe can shift sensibilities to suit different eras.

In Howard Hawks’s 1946 noir The Big Sleep, Bogart turned Marlowe’s cynicism into a cinematic fashion statement, yet there was also a distinctive Bogartian sadness at the character’s core that likened him to an actual human. In Robert Altman’s 1973 neo-noir The Long Goodbye, Gould plays a shaggier, more passive Marlowe, a hipster that ultimately has the same reservoir of sadness as Bogart’s character. This contrast was Altman and Gould’s elegant way of saying that period trappings may change but that certain emotional temperaments are everlasting.

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Disappointingly, Neeson has no take on Marlowe at all. Given that the actor, now 70, is the oldest Marlowe, one might expect aging to inform his characterization. But apart from a few obligatory mentions of Marlowe’s vast experience on the beat, this information doesn’t matter one whit to the film. Neeson plays Marlowe as he has so many roles in the wake of Taken’s success: as a taciturn man with “a very particular set of skills.” Neeson isn’t bad in the role, but he remains aloof from the proceedings as a canny veteran’s way of surviving a turkey. Neeson gives so little to Marlowe that it’s risible when other characters have to opine on the character’s nature. They define him variously as sensitive, enigmatic, and a loner, sometimes within a matter of seconds of meeting Marlowe, but few of these qualities actually scan on screen.

Adapted by Jordan and William Monahan from John Banville’s 2014 novel Black-Eyed Blonde, which was commissioned by the Chandler estate, Marlowe runs through the usual shtick concerning the heart of darkness that beats under Los Angeles in its heyday. Clare (Diane Kruger), seemingly made up to resemble Faye Dunaway in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, enters Marlowe’s office, utters flirtations that might well have been recited from cue cards, and employs him to investigate her missing lover, Nico Peterson (François Arnaud), a props guy at a film studio. Marlowe takes the case, and turns up a standard-issue mixture of drug dealers, crooked politicians, and dens of vice. In most noirs, shadowy characters and various subterranean settings are united by a vast conspiracy, but in Marlowe there is none. The film would seem to have no point except to enable actors to reenact a kind of noir Kabuki.

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Years ago, Jordan made music out of a project that sounded on paper like it shouldn’t work: The Good Thief, a shaggy-dog reworking Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le Flambeur. Remakes of highly influential movies don’t usually go well, but Jordan had a distinctive point of view on the material, transforming the Melville film into a symbolic requiem for the battered brilliance of his troubled lead actor, Nick Nolte. Rather than aping French crime cinema of the 1950s, The Good Thief swung to its own contemporary and sensual beat. Not every film can be like that one, but the disappointment of Marlowe is that Jordan isn’t even trying to find a bridge between the character’s peak in the 1940s and his present-day status. Jordan truly seems to believe that pastiche is enough to get by on, and the film congeals on the screen in front of your eyes.

Score: 
 Cast: Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, Jessica Lane, Alan Cumming, Danny Huston, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Colm Meaney, Daniela Melchior, Ian Hart, François Arnaud  Director: Neil Jordan  Screenwriter: William Monahan, Neil Jordan  Distributor: Open Road Films  Running Time: 110 min  Rating: R  Year: 2022  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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