The Pale Blue Eye

 Atlhough slow-paced and, more than a bit lugubrious, Scott Cooper's The Pale Blue Eye (2023) is an atmospheric and occasionally exciting crime film.  The picture, produced for Netflix, boasts an all-star cast:  Christian Bale plays Landor, a famous New York detective who is nursing his sorrows in an isolated cabin in the woods around 1830 somewhere near West Point; the great British actor, Timothy Spall appears as a rather hapless and panicked general at the helm of the military institute; Gillian Anderson and Robert Duvall have small but important roles and an actor, previously unknown to me, Harry Melling, provides an eccentric, brilliant if rather mannered and stylized performance as Edgar Alan Poe.  Melling has a peculiar physiognomy -- he's delicate, with odd features that combine the handsome with the grotesque:  he has a skeletal triangular face and a pale high forehead and, when admitting that he's not popular at West Point, he gestured vaguely at his bony visage and mutters "aesthetics" in a high-pitched voice.  Melling looks a bit like an anorexic Truman Capote and talks in an exaggerated Southern accent -- it's like he's imitating, half unsuccessfully, a southern gentleman of the equestrian class.  It's a riveting performance and much of the film's appeal arises from Melling's excellent work -- he forms a brittle and neurasthenic contrast to the masculine melancholy that characterizes Bale's performance as the detective.  The movie is excellently shot, with fine, monochromatic landscapes limned with snow.  The bare trees and icy river and the stark bluffs overlooking grim watery abysses are all wonderfully portrayed -- there is a nightmarish aspect to the exteriors, like a typical Hudson Valley School picture that has been x-rayed by the harsh winter and left stark naked on the canvas.  The interiors within the rather Gothic edifices comprising West Point are also nicely photographed -- characters are drowned in dim brownish gloom like figures in a Rembrandt painting. 

The movie is very well-written with excellent period dialogue and its portrait of Edgar Alan Poe is compelling and persuasive.  Unfortunately, this finely appointed and detailed movie is burdened with an idiotic plot that is pure Gothic hokum.  The story is so absurd that its weakness drags the movie down.  Although I think the picture is very well-made with wonderful performances, The Pale Blue Eye is ultimately disappointing because of its mediocre and implausible story.  Briefly:  a cadet at West Point has hanged himself and, post-mortem, been mutilated -- someone has excised his heart.  Landor is summoned from his hermitage to solve the murder before a general scandal results in the demise of West Point.  Poe, who acts the part of a great poet, tells Landor that the removal of the heart was "symbolic" and, therefore, the work of poet, thus he says that he is uniquely qualified to assist in the solution to the crime.  Halfway through the movie, another cadet is found hanged from a grisly-looking and snow-draped cliff.  His heart has also been extracted.  Poe and Landor consult with an old man (played by Robert Duvall) who maintains a large library of manuscripts and ancient books on the subject of the occult.  It appears that devil-worshippers are involved in the mutilation of the corpses.  Poe falls in love with a beautiful young woman who is subject to fits of the "falling sickness" -- that is, epilepsy: she's the daughter of one of the officers responsible for administering West Point.  Landor, we discover, is mourning the suicide of his own daughter (she flung herself off a cliff); this young woman went mad in the aftermath of a gang rape inflicted upon her by three depraved West Point cadets.  Gillian Anderson has a very ripe, plummy role as the mother of the girl with epilepsy -- she seems to be concealing some awful secret and she quivers with scarcely repressed hysteria.  (Anderson's performance is also one of the film's pleasures -- but it's a "guilty pleasure":  she's so over-the-top in her intonations, lashing out at everyone under the pressure of the wicked and depraved secrets that she is  concealing as to be both startling and absurd.  There's a conveniently loquacious prostitute who seems to be servicing most of the characters and she provides information necessary to the solution of the enigmas posed by the movie.  (This role, requiring lots of pillow talk, is played by the formidable Charlotte Gainsborough.)

The film is a master-class in more obscure aspects of Poe's literary works.  In one scene, Poe condemns "Fenimore Cooper" reminding us of his famous essay on that writer.  The detective, Landor, invokes a very late, languid, essay-like story called "Landor's Cottage" -- and, in fact, Christian Bale's character is shown inhabiting a bucolic cottage like that portrayed in the 1849 text.  Scenes involving the beetling cliff overlooking the river remind us of Poe's "The Imp of the Perverse" -- the essay in which Poe maintains, quite plausibly, that to stand on the brink of a precipice is to battle with the "imp of the perverse", an inner voice that counsels us to throw ourselves over the edge.  Of course, Poe's deductions resulting in the solution of the mystery recall to us that the writer, more or less, invented the genre of detective fiction with works featuring Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin such as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter" and "The Mystery of Marie Roget."  The movie's title is a  line from one of Poe's poems about a doomed beauty, "Lenore" (published 1831 after Poe was expelled from West Point -- a figure who features in Poe's famous work, "The Raven."  The motif of young women who are mad, suicidal, and dying, of course, is central to Poe's later literary works.  There are probably lots of other references to minor and neglected works by the writer -- but these were the allusions that I was able to identify.  (Poe enlisted in the army in 1827 and, surprisingly, was a very good soldier -- he rose through the ranks to become a Sergeant-Major, the highest rank available without attending military school.  Upon becoming a Sergeant-Major, Poe enlisted at West Point -- but he didn't like the discipline there and stopped attending classes and chapel, for which infractions he was court-martialed after a few short months.)