This may not sound like a positive statement, but it actually is: This movie is not for everyone. In the spirit of Pennies From Heaven, a Brechtian comment on the mental musical as a way to express the inner thoughts of a character, this film goes a step or two beyond to include the confusing world of self-imposed madness and re-expression of one’s deepest personal issues. As the director Keith Gordon described it at our screening (and I missed some adjectives in this tirade so bear with me) it’s a surrealist absurdist comedy film noir mystery drama lip-synch ’50’s musical fantasy of a psychological thriller.
Written by the late Dennis Potter as a rethinking of his own critical darling of a BBC miniseries of the same name, this Singing Detective has been recast into modern times and America and the script was not fudged with one iota by studio monkeys (except for one song, which was only due to rights issues). What you get is the distilled genius that all 20 fans of the television version have come to revere. Potter wanted to explore the notions of how pop culture invades our consciousness and even reinvents itself in our behaviors and coping strategies. Being British, Potter was drawn by the American iconography of the 1950’s pulp novels and the notion of the lone hero and of our sexual repression.
Robert Downey Jr. plays our titular gumshoe (in his own mind, with some seriously hard-boiled dialogue) and Dan Dark, the author of same (in his life), trapped in a diseased body and processing some heavy baggage from his life. Downey is, as always, riveting, and his personal struggles (well documented by the press) inform his performance in a way that makes this role uniquely his own, which no other actor could have done without drawing attention to it. He can seem filled with rage and still evoke deep compassion with those liquid brown eyes, peering out of a psoriasis-ravaged face. The secondary tragedy is that he would have been a good author if he had freed himself, but now he has trapped himself in this crazy world of fantasies (involving the aforementioned lip-synching) and fury.
Among the huge and fun cast of familiars is Mel Gibson as the very un-Mel Gibson-like Dr. Gibbon; his segments were shot in four days and they bring life to the film when we most feel confused.
What works: We don’t always know what is real and what is in Dark’s mind, and occasionally when the twain shall meet, we can ust sit back and let it ride. This is the kind of movie that sneaks in the back door of your consciousness after you watch it. During viewing, it’s a brow-furrowing exercise in keeping up with the Darks, punctuated by random and alarming seediness and mysterious characters. Dark turned his life experiences into pop culture and replaced his own memories with the real pop culture of the day. This is no way to live. And can you believe this was shot for $7.5 million dollars? Amazing.
What almost or doesn’t work: The surrealist aspect and some of the lighting design choices give it a kind of student film feel at times but taken as a whole, it is a well-balanced concept and, considering everything it is trying to do, very neatly executed. I was also a little unclear on the goons. The film is not as accessible as it could be, but most of the time we get the reward of understanding to push us through to the next wave of madness. See what you think.
MPAA Rating R – strong sexual content, language & violence
Release date 11/7/03
Time in minutes 109
Director Keith Gordon
Studio Paramount Classics