The Pale Blue Eye Review: “The Pale Blue Eye” is one of those evocative and tease-filled movie titles; it makes the movie sound like a Western based on a Lou Reed song. In reality, the film is based on Louis Bayard’s 2006 book of the same name, which frames Edgar Allan Poe’s genesis tale within the context of a murder mystery and a military setting from the 1830s.
A cadet is violently killed at West Point, which in the early 19th century was essentially a fort in the woods with a view of the Hudson River. His feet are on the ground when he is killed by a rope hanging from a tree branch, but it’s what occurs after he passes away that matters: His heart has been extracted through a vertical incision in his chest.
Augustus Landor, the haunting eccentric detective, hired by the West Point brass to uncover the tragedy, is portrayed by Christian Bale. However, this is the tale of two men, as written and directed by Scott Cooper (“Hostiles,” “Crazy Heart”) in what is a painstakingly somber, constrained, and tedious buddy drama.
Early in his research, Cadet Fourth Classman E.A. Poe, whose preference for spotting things coincides with his own, is introduced to Landor. There are numerous images and artworks of Edgar Allen Poe, and Harry Melling, a veteran of the “Harry Potter” movies who plays him, remarkably resembles them. His eyes are so bright with intelligence that they appear slightly crossed. He is short, with a square, pale face framed by sharply parted hair.
But the purpose of his speech is to reassure. Poe, orphaned at a young age and raised in a dysfunctional foster home in Richmond, Virginia, speaks in a pleasant manner akin to an effete Southern dandy in “The Pale Blue Eye.”
He is a nerd who describes himself as an aesthete-aristocrat. When he tells Landor that the person who killed the cadet and cut out his heart was a poet, he demonstrates his credentials as an early-American crime profiler — a type of Benoit Blanc in training. You see, the heart is a symbol. (For Poe, it most certainly was.) It is acting out, meaning taking it out of a body.
Both Landor and Poe enjoy drinking, related to poetry and their need for stimulation to see beyond the ordinary. But by this point, you might be wishing the movie was capable of more than simply inserting commonplace homicide tropes into a frigid, high-toned, “literary” Americana backdrop.
One historical serial killer film I found fascinating was the Hughes brothers’ “From Hell” (2001), which had Johnny Depp as a London investigator who had hallucinatory visions and preferred absinthe.
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His character was quite similar to Melling’s Poe. However, “From Hell,” despite being a movie that few people remember, has vigor, intrigue, and a slicing satanic charge.
“The Pale Blue Eye” attempts to capture the gloom of the 19th century, but it is stagnant and oppressively bleak. Although the movie presents its two detectives in an ostensibly enigmatic dance-of-the-seven-frontier-high-collars manner, we are frequently one step ahead of them.
There are bloody occult rituals taking place! Actors like Timothy Spall portray stern police officers. Lea (Lucy Boynton), the innocent-seeming sister of a cadet who subsequently raises suspicion, is also present.
Poe grows fond of her, but he is pretty ineffective regarding affairs of the heart or at least intact ones. There isn’t much in this that feeds our interest in Poe and his macabre mystery; he’s more like a polite mad scientist lingering around Landor as a sidekick.
Bale, who is recessed behind a well-groomed beard, still occupies the center. His Landor is an outlaw baptized in loss; he is a widower with a deceased daughter.
As one investigator discovers the other’s true identity during the investigation, his unhappiness becomes apparent. However, by that point, any glimmers of attraction they may have once held have faded into apathy. Similarly, we can now see individuals looking for The Pale Blue Eye Review.
Image SourceNYTimeses
What Is The Cast of The Pale Blue Eye?
- Christian Bale as Det. Augustus Landor
- Harry Melling as Edgar Allan Poe
- Gillian Anderson as Julia Marquis
- Lucy Boynton as Lea Marquis
- Charlotte Gainsbourg as Patsy
- Toby Jones as Dr. Daniel Marquis
- Harry Lawtey as Artemus Marquis
- Simon McBurney as Captain Hitchcock
- Timothy Spall as Superintendent Player
- Robert Duvall as Jean-Pepe
- Hadley Robinson as Mattie
- Joey Brooks as Cadet Stoddard
