'Marlowe': not Marlowe, not Neil Jordan, not anything

I had understandable illusion, that little thing that once existed in the past, but lethargic or impossible in the present, before the last resurrection of a literary and cinematographic character named Philip Marlowe. He is played by Liam Neeson, an actor with good looks and very estimable at times (Schindler's List, Michael Collins, Husbands and Wives), but determined exclusively for too long to distribute and receive hosts in expendable and abusive action films under the pretext of one kidnapping after another.

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Raymond Chandler: glory and miseries of the father of the crime novel

Neeson joins here that character that legendary actors such as Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum embroidered without having to make efforts. And I know that Elliott Gould enjoyed prestige in Robert Altman's grotesque reconstruction of Chandler's universe, but that is not my aesthetic or mental roll in imagining the Marlowe I admire and love. My hope is also justified in noting the name of the director of this film. He is Neil Jordan, that bronco and tender Irishman, transmitter of feeling and complexity, author, among others, of the emotional, unsettling and magnificent In the company of wolves, Mona Lisa, Game of tears and Michael Collins. And I repeat to myself that the devastating drought suffered by the current cinema is going to vanish with the last thing that one of the greats has done, that I am going to entertain and excite myself, that I will finally be able to recommend a film to my cinephile friends.

Chandler frequently made a mess of his arguments. But his characters, his dialogues, that prose as sarcastic as lyrical, the atmosphere he created, reveal a priceless writer. There are also moments when logic fails in the script of The Eternal Sleep, but it doesn't matter. It is a masterpiece, the best film ever made about Philip Marlowe, that crushed, honest and biting detective who permanently distrusted power, who at the end of The Long Goodbye, certified that at one time everything was sad, lonely and final. Now, Marlowe is a seventy-year-old man (I never imagined he would grow old), who is commissioned by a sophisticated lady to look for her missing lover. It's supposed to be 1939 and in Los Angeles, but soon you get the feeling that the scenario may have been created anywhere. I am informed that it is Barcelona. That sense of falsehood, of visual and narrative cutrerio, of a conventional script that has nothing exciting to tell, floods almost all the footage. You consume it without anything bad happening to you, foreseeing each reluctant situation, with a plot that sounds like repeated plagiarism, tedious in its follow-up, with the feeling that it has been an assignment resolved with apathy, without the slightest spark or weather, with fights filmed with Z series style. There should not be enough pasta, although they did not replace the shortcomings using the imagination, bringing a little soul and fascination to the story.

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Liam Neeson walks around, fulfilling dry, without having to do or say something that excites a slightly demanding viewers. Diane Kruger and Jessica Lange, actresses who have been exemplary on so many occasions, limit themselves to repeating stereotypes of scheming and jaded millionaires. The big disappointment is that the firm Neil Jordan, someone who knew how to tell stories and convey feelings. If the best fail, what can be expected of those who repeat formulas ad nauseam, of pretentious mediocrity. The crossing of the desert has never been so long and strenuous. Well, we still have the last of Scorsese. But go find out if he has also been infected by nothing.

Marlowe

Address: Neil Jordan.

Interpreters: Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, Jessica Lange, Danny Huston, Ian Hart, Colm Meaney.

Genre: thriller. Ireland, 2022.

Duration: 109 minutes.

Premiere: May 12.

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