The first thing The Raven does is tell us that “[Edgar Allan Poe’s] last days remain a mystery” — a mystery that this film does nothing to help elucidate, instead making us wish, for the iconic author’s sake, that Poe had shuffled off his mortal coil at least one week earlier than he actually did; that is, assuming that his last days were anything like director James McTeigue and screenwriters Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare imagined them to be.
It’s a shame, because John Cusack, an imaginative actor with a melancholic streak, is an excellent choice to play the legendary Bostonian writer. Unfortunately, Cusack’s performance doesn’t go beyond the surface; he looks great, but his personality is closer to a second-rate gothic facsimile of Oscar Wilde than anything else.
On the other hand, there’s not much the actor could have done with this material, which seems to have been written by Poe’s detractors. Both W.B. Yeats and Aldous Huxley accused him of being vulgar, and vulgarity is precisely what Cusack evokes, at least in the opening scenes — which at the same time happen to be the only ones that have the slightest connection to reality.
If Cusack’s Poe has little to do with the historical person, The Raven as a whole has even less to do with the famous poem of the same name in particular, and with the entirety of the writer’s work in general.
All originality and innovation have been drained from Poe’s prose and poetry, and replaced with a poor imitation that doesn’t even rise to the level of pastiche. Unable to recreate the tone and atmosphere of EAP’s oeuvre, the filmmakers have opted for an approach that feels like a greatest hits set played by a cover band.
In 19th century Baltimore, a killer sets out to commit gruesome murders inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Detective Emmett Fields (Luke Evans) enlists the writer to help him solve the crimes, though it remains unclear why A) Fields needs Poe, and B) how Poe could be of any assistance.
Concerning option B, Poe can’t even manage to recall his own bibliography. When Fields asks, “have you ever written anything about a sailor?” Poe replies in the negative, forgetting not only The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, but also “A Descent into the Maelström.”
As for option A, after the murderer kidnaps Emily Hamilton (Alice Eve) — a completely fictional character that the filmmakers have concocted in order to give the hero a romantic interest that isn’t his 13-year-old cousin — and Poe suspects the worst, Fields reassures him that the villain will “keep her alive to keep [Poe] involved.” Fields turns out to be right, but he could only know that if he were psychic or if he has read the script, either of which more than qualifies him to crack the case on his own.
Meanwhile, the villain is one of those movie serial killers with time on their hands to devise elegant puzzles for their victims and the police; in this case building life-size dioramas inspired by Poe’s stories.
The bad guy turns out to be an unprepossessing typesetter at the newspaper that infrequently publishes Poe’s reviews; this character, named Ivan, doesn’t seem to have the means nor the brains (Poe asks where Emily is and Ivan answers that she’s dying. Dude, he asked ‘where’ she is, not what she’s doing) to execute such an overly convoluted plan as this one.
All things considered, the filmmakers have more in common with the antagonist than the protagonist; like Ivan, they have, in a pathetic cry for attention, hijacked Poe’s work and turned it into a lesser version of itself. Like McTeigue, Ivan knows the words but not the music.
I would furthermore equate McTeigue with Rufus Wilmot Griswold, Poe’s literary rival — portrayed in the film as Ludwig Griswold, victim of a pendulum (but not a pit) — who intended to destroy EAP’s reputation after his death. Griswold failed miserably in that endeavor, and thankfully the same may be said of McTeigue and The Raven.
90% of Everything is Crap 