Before it becomes a knockoff of The Ninth Gate, The Pale Blue Eye has a very promising first 15 minutes. Unfortunately, just as the film is building up a head of steam, writer/director Scott Cooper decides to introduce the character of a young Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling), dealing his own movie a fatal blow from which it never really recovers.
EAP pretty much invented the detective story, but he wasn’t a detective himself any more than, say, Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie were; why, then, this obstinate inability and/or unwillingness to separate the creator from his creation (in this case, C. Auguste Dupin)? Why this unimaginative fascination with Poe the Crime-Solver? Didn’t we learn anything from The Raven? (though I must say that that film, ludicrous as it was, at least had a respectable Poe in John Cusack).
Why would Cooper do this? Doesn’t he want this film to be taken seriously? Considering every other single aspect of The Pale Blue Eye, as well as Cooper’s body of work as a whole (once short and sweet, but souring incrementallyy with each new entry), I’d expect the answer to that question to be ‘yes’ — and yet, Melling’s stylized, almost alien performance and appearance feel like something out of a Tim Burton flick (and not even a live-action Tim Burton flick), totally out of place in an otherwise gritty thriller.
Moreover, nothing even remotely resembling the events of the film ever came close to happening to Poe (to put it in perspective, in the movie Poe declares, “If I were to kill every cadet who had abused me during my brief tenure here, I’m afraid you would find the Corp of Cadets reduced to less than a dozen,” whereas in reality Poe’s third volume of poems was financed with help from his fellow cadets at West Point — it’s safe to assume that more than “less than a dozen” chipped in —, and he even dedicated it “To the U.S. Corps of Cadets”).
All things considered, every time Melling comes onscreen, and it’s quite often, any momentum the film has managed to accrue comes to a screeching halt — and for what? Clearly, the character is only in the movie because a) it was in Louis Bayard’s original novel (unread by me), and b) the climactic plot twist (itself a worn-out gimmick) demands a witness who will put two and two together for the benefit of the audience. Either Cooper took too many liberties with the source material, or not enough.
PS. It’s becoming more and more apparent that Cooper and his go-to star Christian Bale are nowhere near recapturing the virtuosity of Out of the Furnace (then again, few have captured it in the first place); The Pale Blue Eye will go down as a notoriously squandered golden opportunity, especially given the people involved: in addition to Bale there are Robert Duvall, Tim Spall, and Charlotte Gainsbourg (and even, why not, ‘hey, it’s those guys’ Toby Jones and Simon McBurney).
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