Score: 4 / 5
The year is 1830, and the dying of the year is settling on the Hudson River Valley. Chilly weather precedes a chilling crime as a West Point Military Academy cadet is found hanged; soon after, his body is discovered to be desecrated and his heart forcibly removed. Terrified of scandal at the fledgling institution, the captains and superintendents hire a nearby semi-retired detective to investigate. While looking into possible -- and evidently likely -- occult activities on campus, he realizes he needs to penetrate the cadre of cadets to learns what's going on internally: enter a young Edgar Allan Poe, a real-life cadet at the time, whose poetic personality leads him to assist in the investigation.
The Pale Blue Eye is a recent Netflix film that adapts a magnificent novel by Louis Bayard. It's a difficult project, to be sure, as one of the primary charms of the book is the occasional shift in narrative voice from the detective to Poe; fans of the latter find the passages written in Poe's voice beautifully rendered from the historical man and artistic visionary. It seems appropriate that the so-called father of the American detective story would get his taste for the aesthetic from a formative experience early in his life, and so the whole concept is brilliant. And, while the novel almost ceaselessly twists its way through red herrings and minor mysteries to be solved, the film manages to faithfully adapt the major moments for its primary story. It just can never quite capture the joyful voice of Poe himself.
Which is by no means a fault of the cast or director/screenwriter. Scott Cooper helms this in those latter two capacities, and it's about as bleak as anything else he's done (Antlers, Hostiles, Black Mass, Out of the Furnace). Cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi views the whole thing -- surely inspired by the title -- in pale gray hues, so much so that the whole thing could have been quite effective in black and white, except for streaks of blue in the river valley and the cadet uniforms. And the cast is great across the board, from underutilized but effective heads of West Point including Simon McBurney and Timothy Spall, to the primary family of suspicion including Toby Jones, Gillian Anderson, and Lucy Boynton.
The detective himself, Augustus Landor, is played by frequent Cooper collaborator Christian Bale. Landor, semi-retired no doubt due to isolation, alcoholism, and depression -- he's a widower whose adolescent daughter left him a couple years ago -- is still sharp as a knife and quick-witted. Prone as he is to the bottle and to melancholy sexual encounters with a local barmaid (Charlotte Gainsbourg), he seems dedicated to cut through the bureaucratic crap of the academy and solve the crimes. One might wonder why an actor of Bale's uncommon skills wants to play a bedraggled, world-weary man so comparatively early in his career, but if you're familiar with the book, he's not as detached from the proceedings as he first appears.
And then there's Harry Melling, playing Poe, whose performances lately have proved him a frighteningly intense and versatile actor coming into his own. He reminds me a bit of a young Gary Oldman in that way, and I'm eager to see how he continues. Here, though, he straddles a fine line between the agony of an artist unable to fully commit to his craft, the urgency of solving a crime for which he will inevitably also be targeted (either as a potential victim or suspect, or both), and his eager romanticism that will lead him into trouble with the family of the primary suspect. There are a few key scenes in this respect that shine, as he courts the sister of a particularly brutal cadet, though these were far more numerous and emotionally impactful in the novel. It's a side plot that better serves our understanding of Poe's character -- he uses her name to inspire some poetry of his own under the similar name "Lenore" -- that would make the already bloated film much longer.
But for a bleak, literary, and haunting mystery in the chilly midwinter, The Pale Blue Eye is exactly what the poet ordered.
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