Wednesday Addams may see her title of “Netflix’s resident goth detective” challenged by the release of The Pale Blue Eye. Scott Cooper’s period thriller places a young Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling) at the centre of a fictionalised murder mystery in upstate New York. But, to Cooper’s credit, the film feels a lot less silly in practice than the one-sentence elevator pitch of Louis Bayard’s source novel. It’s a handsome adaptation, albeit with an unnecessary bit of literary celebrity dragged alongside it.
It’s 1830, and veteran detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) has been summoned to Westpoint Military Academy, where Poe happens to be stationed (the only detail true to biography). The dead body of a cadet, found hanged under suspicious circumstances, has been desecrated post-mortem – his heart carved from his chest and spirited away. We’re to be reminded, of course, of the “tell-tale heart” that drove the murderous and guilt-ridden protagonist of Poe’s famous short story to his eventual confession. Yet no such hauntings occur. The Pale Blue Eye – even the title is borrowed from that same story – is peppered with these sorts of substanceless references to the author’s work.
Landor stumbles across Poe in the local tavern. He finds the man’s curious theories and bone-deep connection to the occult intriguing – it’s as if he’s an ideal, if gloomy, Watson to his Holmes. A raven watches over the pair, though it never quoths “nevermore”. A crumbling structure is meant to carry the same symbolic collapse as The Fall of the House of Usher. The name “Lenore” is whispered with trembling portent. But these are all about as useful to Cooper’s narrative as hidden Easter eggs are to a Marvel flick. Far more crucial, but largely absent, is the moral essence of Poe’s stories. The shuddering terror of a man’s mortality. Karmic punishment dealt by phantasmic hands. A corruptive melancholy. The occasional blast of fog is hardly in itself enough to do the trick.
But The Pale Blue Eye at least moves with elegant severity, like a film about 19th-century murder should. That’s despite the rich, painterly blues of the soldier’s uniforms, and the lamp-lit domestic spaces captured by cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi, both of which feel jarringly ungothic at times.
Cooper’s previous films – including two collaborations with Bale, Out of the Furnace and Hostiles – have examined the American myth through the cracked veneer of the nation’s sins. The same is true here. As a portrait of nascent America, it benefits from a largely British cast, with accents appropriate to the time. Among them are Timothy Spall, Toby Jones, Lucy Boynton and Industry’s Harry Lawtey. Gillian Anderson, in the role of a haughty local socialite, seems to be expunging the last remains of her Margaret Thatcher in The Crown. Robert Duvall cameos in a role that reads more as a favour to Cooper. Bale’s casual weariness as Landor summons a little authenticity out of the most familiar of archetypes: the drunken and cynical detective with a tragic past.
But Melling’s performance is the real draw, and a new peak for the actor after strong supporting work in The Queen’s Gambit, The Tragedy of Macbeth and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. He embraces Poe’s pompous, showman nature – “I am an artist, I have no nation,” he declares – while drawing him back from the edge of parody, allowing instead for a certain delicate woundedness. I’m not sure how accurate his Poe is, but he’s wholeheartedly in service of a script like Cooper’s – one in which Landor, at one point, says Poe is such a good guy that he only wishes he could have introduced him to his daughter. The real Poe would go on to marry his 13-year-old cousin.
Dir: Scott Cooper. Starring: Christian Bale, Harry Melling, Gillian Anderson, Lucy Boynton, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Toby Jones, Robert Duvall. 15, 128 minutes.
‘The Pale Blue Eye’ is in selected cinemas from 23 December and can be streamed on Netflix from 6 January
