The Singing Detective Review
by Harvey S. Karten (harveycritic AT cs DOT com)October 8th, 2003
THE SINGING DETECTIVE
Reviewed by: Harvey S. Karten
Grade: B-
Paramount Classics
Directed by: Keith Gordon
Written by: Dennis Potter
Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Robin Wright Penn, Mel Gibson, Jeremy Northam, Katie Holmes, Adrien Brody, Jon Polito, Carla Gugino, Saul Rubinek, Alfre Woodard
Screened at: Preview 9, NYC, 10/6/03
Keith Gordon's "The Singing Detective," written by Dennis Potter and freely adapted from Potter's BBC mini-series, is the most genre-bending film in recent memory, bringing to mind Potter's scripting of the 1981 film "Pennies from Heaven." The film is so bold in its design, so risky that only an indie studio would tackle it, so well-acted particularly in the interchange between Robert Downey Jr. and Mel Gibson, that it's a shame the transitions do not mesh. What bursts forth does not follow the conventions of Broadway and off-Broadway musicals in which the songs advance the plot, but a helter-skelter series of twists among music, dance, song, pulp fiction, and paranoia that are so contorted, you wonder how they could by any reasonable stretch of the imagination come from the same movie. Better writing could have converted this flaw into another "Pennies from Heaven," Potter's 1930's-style musical numbers clashing with bleak visions of the Depression.
While Steve Martin's A-1 performance gave "Pennies" its resonance, Robert Downey Jr. is no slouch in writer Potter's "The Singing Detective." Downey performs in the role of Dan Dark, author of cheesy Mickey-Spillane-like detective stories, who has landed in the hospital with a severe case of psoriatic arthritis an illness not unlike that suffered by writer Dennis Potter himself. Like the noir detectives of the 40's, Dark sees himself as a lone individual, in his case one who is plotted against by sinister forces, symbolized in this film by his stay in a private room of a hospital. In his claustrophobic quarters, shot up with drugs, he hallucinates both his paranoid plots and musical numbers from the 1950's. In his mind, his estranged wife (Robin Wright Penn) is carrying on affairs, most notably with handsome Mark Binney (Jeremy Northam), who, together with his wife are intent on stealing a screenplay called "The Singing Detective," which Dark imagines he had hidden in shoe boxes. We learn later how Dark developed a disgust for sex and dislike of women, the story's hinting that like Jean-Claude Marat of the France of revolutionary times, his skin ailment is psychosomatic.
The women are for the most part seen by Dark as slutty and grouchy while the men are either gangsters or quacks who are using him for their own benefit. There are two exceptions: one is the kind Nurse Mills (Katie Holmes), who regularly applies lotion to his skin resulting in his embarrassing ejaculation. The other is an off-beat psychiatrist, Dr. Gibbon (played as a character actor by Mel Gibson, his voice, posture, and looks so distorted that he is unrecognizable).
While the dialogue between Dan Dark and Dr. Gibbon is the vocal high point of the film, "The Singing Detective" is essentially an exercise in cinematic visuals. Keith Vanderlaan and Gregg Cannon combine forces to give Downey the look of a human pizza, sores and postules covering every inch of his skin making him almost as unrecognizable as Gibson. Lighting is so varied that it could be called another unusual character: bright as a sunny day in the hospital room, signifying the impossibility of Dark's hiding from his demons; dark in many of the gangster themes, the hoods played by Adrien Brody and Jon Polito. While Dan Dark's rants at the doctors, nurses, his estranged wife and, in the beginning, his psychiatrist are loud and clear, the gangster talk is so muffled that only audience members with perfect hearing can decipher the words. The lip-synching to songs like "My Special Angel" and "Mr. Sandman" is mediocre and the choreography, by people who are admittedly not Fred Astaires, is passable.
The hallucinations of the title detective, who has a second job as a singer in a nightclub, incorporate Dark's own childhood, in which his mother (Carla Gugino) is sent away by her husband from the California desert with the boy who observes the nightly returns of his mother with different men who abuse her while engaging in sex for money. What Leonard Maltin said about "Pennies from Heaven" is entirely applicable to "The Singing Detective"..."The mixture is intellectually provocative, but troubling as entertainment."
Rated R. 109 minutes.(c) 2003 by Harvey Karten at
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