The Pale Blue EyeLoss haunts us. It drives us from a path of warmth and virtue and onto the path of desolation, damnation, and despair. The Pale Blue Eye is a detective story set in 1830, amid the cold and bleak backdrop of winter. Our protagonist is Augustus Landor (Christian Bale), whose reputation as a skilled and astute detective brings him to the attention of Captain Hitchcock (Simon McBurney) of the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, to discover the circumstances of a presumed suicide...one with a twist. The victim's heart was cut out of his chest after being hanged.
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The Pale Blue Eye is written and directed by Scott Cooper, and was adapted from the novel of the same name by Louis Bayard. A key detail in the book and film is that this is set during a time when acclaimed and beloved author and poet Edgar Allan Poe--played by Harry Melling in the film--was a cadet there. Moreover, the young Poe is informally deputized by Landor to aid him in his investigation after the enthusiastic young poet approaches him with a clue. Landor and Poe make for an intriguing combination. The young Poe is depicted as full of energy and eagerness to prove his acumen to the senior investigator, who all but unwittingly becomes a mentor (and friend) to the cadet. It is in their interactions that you can sense that Landor longs for a simpler time in his past when he too felt this same enthusiasm for his trade. Their dynamic is a familiar one found in detective stories, recalling perhaps the most famous duo in the genre, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. Combined with the setting--which is an insular one, largely removed from much of the rest of the world--the film also reminded me of The Name of the Rose. (The teacher/student dynamic between Landor and Poe is reminiscent of William and Adso a bit.) Poe has little to no interest in being a cadet; one wonders how he ended up as one anyway. He prefers to spend his time writing poetry and drinking at the local tavern, run by a woman named Patsy (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who has become Landor's lover. Landor remains in grief over the passing of his wife a couple of years earlier, as well as the absence of his daughter, Mattie (Hadley Robinson). Landor tells those who ask that she has run away; he still sees her in his dreams. Similarly, Poe remarks to Landor that his mother speaks to him in his dreams, so both men share a common aspect: they are "haunted" by degrees. Although The Pale Blue Eye is no ghost story, it does deal in the kind of psychological terror and horror that defined the body of work left behind by Edgar Allan Poe. It is no exaggeration to say that Edgar Allen Poe is largely responsible for creating both the detective story and short story format that we still use today. His legacy cannot be overstated, and yet he was a man with troubles who was also once a lost young man, like many. No one sets out to lead a haunted existence; The Pale Blue Eye speculates as to how this great author and poet may have come to be this way, something incidental to Landor's case.
I watched The Pale Blue Eye with my wife, who is an enthusiast of (among other things) period accurate costuming in films. She observed that The Pale Blue Eye is a rare film which makes great efforts to be consistent with the period in which it's set through this attention to costuming, more than most by far. (She even commented on a pair of boots that laced up on the sides--a detail that surely must have been a deliberate one by the filmmakers.) The reason I bring this up is that this film makes great strides to be convincing and believable, which makes the audience's immersion in the material and the setting all the stronger--which, for me and my wife, at least, adds a richer sense of enjoyment. After all, why have a movie set in the past if people tend to look and act like people today (unless it's meant to be ironic, such as in The Favourite.) The cold, wintry backdrop gives everything in the film a washed out look--almost as though the movie might have been shot in black and white at times. The frigid setting reinforces the strict, unbending attitudes of the military academy, headed up by Superintendent Thayer (Timothy Spall), who along with Hitchcock are at a loss for how to investigate the death of Cadet Leroy Fry (Steven Maier); thus they seek external assistance. (One suspects that this is also to keep such an investigation out of official channels.) Landor tests Poe to interpret a partial letter gripped in the hand of the victim, and Poe's intellect--if not his experience--allows him to pass Landor's test. Subsequently, Landor tasks him to infiltrate a group of Fry's fellow cadets--a band reputed to be ne'er-do-wells of a sort, including Cadet Artemus Marquis (Harry Lawtey), the son of the academy's doctor, Dr. Daniel Marquis (Toby Jones). And as a result, the young Poe becomes enamored with the sister of Artemus, a young woman named Lea (Lucy Boynton). His heart swells as he gets to know her and appreciate all of the loveliness she has in her, despite a complicated home life and tensions that exist within the Marquis household, including its seemingly affected matriarch, Julia Marquis (Gillian Anderson). Meanwhile, Landor plumbs the depths of the community in and around the military academy, and even leverages some of his own resources--such as an occult historian, Jean-Pepe (Robert Duvall)--to ascertain why the heart was cleaved from Fry's body. And like all good stories--especially detective stories--there are more than a few turns which I will resist divulging here, because that is where much of the enjoyment of the story lies. A key theme in The Pale Blue Eye, however, is heartbreak. There is a constant and unrelenting sadness in Landor, and it colors the film by way of his interactions with others. He is a man who has lost faith in everything, and who seems to be himself a ghost haunting the freezing waters of the Hudson River by his reclusive cabin in the woods. Who better to serve as a font of inspiration for one of literature's most haunted authors then?
Recommended for: Fans of classical detective stories in the vein of Poe with an exciting level of historical verisimilitude. The Pale Blue Eye demonstrates why the format which Poe was so instrumental in creating for drama, intrigue, horror, and mystery works as well then as it does today.
I watched The Pale Blue Eye with my wife, who is an enthusiast of (among other things) period accurate costuming in films. She observed that The Pale Blue Eye is a rare film which makes great efforts to be consistent with the period in which it's set through this attention to costuming, more than most by far. (She even commented on a pair of boots that laced up on the sides--a detail that surely must have been a deliberate one by the filmmakers.) The reason I bring this up is that this film makes great strides to be convincing and believable, which makes the audience's immersion in the material and the setting all the stronger--which, for me and my wife, at least, adds a richer sense of enjoyment. After all, why have a movie set in the past if people tend to look and act like people today (unless it's meant to be ironic, such as in The Favourite.) The cold, wintry backdrop gives everything in the film a washed out look--almost as though the movie might have been shot in black and white at times. The frigid setting reinforces the strict, unbending attitudes of the military academy, headed up by Superintendent Thayer (Timothy Spall), who along with Hitchcock are at a loss for how to investigate the death of Cadet Leroy Fry (Steven Maier); thus they seek external assistance. (One suspects that this is also to keep such an investigation out of official channels.) Landor tests Poe to interpret a partial letter gripped in the hand of the victim, and Poe's intellect--if not his experience--allows him to pass Landor's test. Subsequently, Landor tasks him to infiltrate a group of Fry's fellow cadets--a band reputed to be ne'er-do-wells of a sort, including Cadet Artemus Marquis (Harry Lawtey), the son of the academy's doctor, Dr. Daniel Marquis (Toby Jones). And as a result, the young Poe becomes enamored with the sister of Artemus, a young woman named Lea (Lucy Boynton). His heart swells as he gets to know her and appreciate all of the loveliness she has in her, despite a complicated home life and tensions that exist within the Marquis household, including its seemingly affected matriarch, Julia Marquis (Gillian Anderson). Meanwhile, Landor plumbs the depths of the community in and around the military academy, and even leverages some of his own resources--such as an occult historian, Jean-Pepe (Robert Duvall)--to ascertain why the heart was cleaved from Fry's body. And like all good stories--especially detective stories--there are more than a few turns which I will resist divulging here, because that is where much of the enjoyment of the story lies. A key theme in The Pale Blue Eye, however, is heartbreak. There is a constant and unrelenting sadness in Landor, and it colors the film by way of his interactions with others. He is a man who has lost faith in everything, and who seems to be himself a ghost haunting the freezing waters of the Hudson River by his reclusive cabin in the woods. Who better to serve as a font of inspiration for one of literature's most haunted authors then?
Recommended for: Fans of classical detective stories in the vein of Poe with an exciting level of historical verisimilitude. The Pale Blue Eye demonstrates why the format which Poe was so instrumental in creating for drama, intrigue, horror, and mystery works as well then as it does today.