A priori, The Pale Blue Eye has key ingredients for a captivating detective film: a mysterious story of serial murders, a star cast and a protagonist inspired by the poet Edgar Allan Poe. However, the film fails to raise its actors – including Christian Bale – to their full potential and suffers from a disappointing outcome.
Directed by Scott Cooper (crazyheart and In the heart of the fire), this production is an adaptation of the novel of the same name, written by American Louis Bayard and published in 2003. Set on the campus of the military academy at West Point in the Hudson Valley in 1830, the original narrative is inspired by Poe’s work, as is the gloomy atmosphere of the film.
The author of Crow actually studied at West Point at the same time. However, the story presented to us in the film remains completely fictional. We follow veteran detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale), who is tasked with investigating a series of gruesome murders that occur at the academy. A young cadet, Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling), befriends him and helps him in his investigation, years before he is revealed to the public as a writer.
Harry Melling shines, Christian Bale pales
The Pale Blue Eye boasts an impressive cast, which also includes Gillian Anderson, Robert Duvall, Timothy Spall, Toby Jones and even Charlotte Gainsbourg. Alas, the almost mechanical, even forced sequence of twists in the story harms the performance of the actors, especially that of Christian Bale.
The actor, who stood out in American Psycho and more recently in Vice, instead gives way here to the brilliant Harry Melling, who embodies all the verve and sensitivity of a young Edgar Allan Poe. This British actor, known for his role as Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter saga, even gives his character a necessary comic dimension, in an otherwise quite dark story.
The Edgar Allan Poe found in the film could, however, leave the poet’s admirers unsatisfied. Often reduced to his alcoholism, his flamboyant personality and his ability to make enemies, he borders on caricature. Fortunately for Harry Melling, we understand that this is essentially a concern for scriptwriting, and not shortcomings in his performance.
Presented exclusively on Netflix, The Pale Blue Eye only saw a handful of theatrical screenings before its online release. Moreover, it remains perfectly suited to the more distracted viewings that we commonly indulge in at home, since it is essentially based on the expectation created by the investigation and that it turns out, at least, to be very entertaining.
It even feels like Scott Cooper should have made a TV series out of it. In the film, emotion and suspense fall flat, in a disappointing melodramatic ending that we won’t divulge here. We can nevertheless specify that it concerns a secret that the character of Christian Bale hides. His actions in the final scenes seem almost unjustified as his psychology is only superficially addressed.
With more time, the filmmaker could not only have deepened each of his characters more, but also made his story breathe better, which remains very dense to the point of seeming monotonous. Visibly neat, his staging also adopts television codes. It thus fails to give rise to real moments of grace worthy of the great Netflix films such as Rome Where Marriage Story.
The Pale Blue Eye At the very least, it will appeal to cinephiles eager for good entertainment and an unpretentious investigative film. But maybe we could also find better ways to invest our two long hours, like reading, why not, a book by Poe.