The Pale Blue Eye

  • 07 Jan - 13 Jan, 2023
  • Mag The Weekly
  • Reviews

Netflix's period procedural The Pale Blue Eye has the fascination element of being a murder mystery that also doubles as an Edgar Allan Poe origin story. It is a gloomy slow burn of a film that never sparks, even when a crime scene is set ablaze. This third project with writer-director Scott Cooper and Christian Bale (after Out of the Furnace and Hostiles) is significantly more focused on gothic mood than suspense. It is based on the 2003 novel by Louis Bayard. With lots of mist-covered rooms and well-done acting, it is visually appealing yet the plot is clunky and uninteresting.

Bale plays the fictional Augustus Landor, a widowed former police investigator with a solid reputation for solving complex cases and cracking codes who lives alone in a lonely home in Hudson Valley, New York, around 1830.

The brass of the still-developing U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Colonel Thayer (Timothy Spall) and Captain Hitchcock (Simon McBurney), ask Landor to look into the death of a cadet who was found hanged from a tree with his heart surgically removed. It is essential that the issue be resolved quickly and discreetly given the rumblings coming out of Washington about senators seeking to close the academy.

Landor meets the young Poe (Harry Melling) while interviewing the dead man's fellow cadets, and because of his sharp mind, the investigator decides to use him as an unofficial deputy on the case.

Poe was a poet who had been published at the time, but he had not yet become the macabre master whose puzzles are frequently credited with creating detective fiction. In his work, Bayard makes assumptions about the circumstances that led him in that way and fed his fascination with death, gloomy mysticism, and destined love. Although he enjoys the occasional drink, Poe isn't depicted as the sleazy drunkard of his later years but rather as a sharp youthful wit with a curlicue way with words and a fondness for florid gestures.

Melling plays up the flamboyant way with the lilting twang of Poe's Virginia years, playing up his twig-like body and cartoon gargoyle of a skull. That exaggeration fluctuates, maybe indicating that it was in part a misfit bullied by the more stereotypically male cadets in the academy. However, it comes across as inconsistent performance. Timothée Chalamet, who costarred with Cooper and Bale in Hostiles, apparently received the role first; he may have had the charisma necessary to succeed. Melling, however, lacks leadership, especially with Poe courting danger due to his impetuous nature.

The growing connection between Poe and Landor contains a father-son surrogacy element, but neither Cooper nor the performers are able to make it particularly moving. Bale's Landor is a troubled loner with a straggly beard and hair that appears to have been cut himself with a knife. Melling smothers his role in deliberate oddities, and his character doesn't really connect with anybody else. This features Charlotte Gainsbourg playing Patsy, the occasionally-sleeping local tavern barmaid who has a melancholy expression on her face, in the underwritten role. Despite the care taken to use language that is accurate for the time period, Bale nonetheless has a few loud, shouty passages that seem too modern.

Toby Jones plays Dr. Daniel Marquis, a shady local doctor, alongside Spall, who is sporting his trademark pinched-facial imperiousness from Spencer, and McBurney, a versatile stage actor.

Gillian Anderson portrays his nosy social matron wife Julia in one of her more mannered turns. The entire Marquis family is tarnished by sinister secrets, including their haughty alpha-male cadet son Artemus (Harry Lawtey) and their sickly but seductive daughter Lea (Lucy Boynton). Poe's sudden feelings for Lea come out of nowhere, but as the puzzle pieces come together, they serve to cloud his judgement.

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