The Pale Blue Eye is a pale venture that leaves you feeling blue

Scott Cooper’s The Pale Blue Eye is a hot one on Netflix. I use the description ‘hot’ very consciously as the entire film unfolds in the freezing snow-capped New York of 1830 around the end of the year when people are normally celebrating.

Not this time. Not this film The lugubrious tone never leaves the film, and it is a long one. Almost two and a half hours of mulling over murdered bodies, examining them carefully to see how their hearts were carved out, how artistically they were castrated, and so on. It is not my idea of an evening of relaxation with a good movie. How about yours?

If you like cryptic occultist murder mysteries The Pale Blue Eye with its soft corner for elaborate homicide, just may be the kick to do the trick for you. For me, the pale silhouetted shots subsuming slivers of unfinished unspoken business seems like a whole lot of pretentious hokum wrapped up in a kind of icy enigma that gives off the impression of being more juicily mysterious than it actually is.

What made the film more than watchable for me was the exceptional Christian Bale. A remarkably immersive actor, Bale before Pale…. has worked with director Scott Cooper in two other dark mysterious films Out Of The Furnace and Hostiles, both more cogent coherent and compelling than this murder mystery where the mystery struck when boys from the military academy are found missing hanging. It is about our pride and reputation, bellows the superintendent of the Academy, as only Timothy Spall can.

There is a hint of homophobia in the humid air. I wish Cooper’s screenplay (based on Louis Bayard’s novel) had picked on a more resonant socio-cultural affliction to explain the murders. The film just flies off into sunless tangents. The darker the motives for the crime, the more the narrative gets mired in its own ingenuity, shocking itself more than us the audience.

Christian Bale as Augustus Landor a burnt-out grieving alcoholic detective tries to impale the pale shadows that haunt the plot, into tangible shapes. He is brilliantly corrosive and calming. The other outstanding performance comes from the Harry Potter actor Harry Melling who plays a very young Edgar Allen Poe, yes the Poe himself.

Some of the more interesting moments in the lumbering plot occur when Poe and Landor fence verbally on the murder mystery and the mysteries of the universe. It is Poe who solves the film’s big mystery. Yes, there are two denouements, one bizarre and the other banal. Neither is worth holding our breath for.

It’s not that The Pale Blue Eye doesn’t have moments of glorious epiphany. But they occur much too infrequently. Most of the narration is like plodding in the snow that covers the frames. Making it worse are the supporting performances from hysterical actors.

Gillian Anderson as an important link in the mystery is shown breaking a plate at a dinner sequence. I came close to feeling the same way. The mystery is frustrating in its lying layering. But the director knows how to make revealing use of his actor’s idiosyncrasies so that what they say or do is not as interesting as what they don’t say or do. This is precisely the kind of hazy existentialism that this film propounds. If it gets away with it, it’s because we are a sucker for murder mysteries, especially those that are set in a distant time, far removed from our times and therefore a safe bet.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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