The Movie

As a would-be film critic – and believe you me, I stress the "would-be" label big time – I find it strangely alluring when I encounter a film that leaves me as equivocal as The Singing Detective. Not so much that I found the film to be middling or that it left me indifferent, but rather because The Singing Detective is so frustratingly brilliant and gloriously meandering. It is as bipolar as Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket but less delineated in narrative: instead of a tonal paradigm shift halfway through the film, the film's stronger elements are skillfully intertwined with its pointless wanderings throughout its running time. All at once you find yourself astonished and indifferent. Frustrating? Absolutely… but not without its rewards.

The Singing Detective is best known as a 1986 British television miniseries, starring Michael Gambon as a novelist suffering from a psoriatic arthropathy, a crippling and debilitating skin and bone disease. To escape from both his physical and emotional agony, he retreats into a fantasy world based on his own novel (also entitled "The Singing Detective"), in which he assumes the title role of a hard-boiled detective, culling people and events from his childhood and formulating a world replete with secret agents and criminals. His Orpheus-like descent into this dream world forms the basis of his healing, in which his physical ailment represents only a fraction of his illness.

Or so they say: I confess to never having seen the original miniseries. So when I approached director Keith Gordon's 2003 remake of the same name, I brought along no baggage or preconceptions about the material. In this film, Robert Downey Jr. takes on the title role as Dan Dark, the novelist turned psoriasis patient. When we first encounter Dark, it is shockingly abrupt: a quick-cut edit from darkness and shadows to a bright, antiseptic hospital corridor, with a tight close-up on Dark's rotted, scabbed, lesion-riddled face. We soon discover that Dark is a contemptuous and irritable man: self-loathing, bitter, and unwilling to proceed with his own healing. He escapes from his agonizing existence into a dream world that evokes classic 1940s/1950s film noir movies: shadows at every corner, double-crosses from anyone and everyone, crackerjack dialog that nobody in the real world would ever have the lightning wit and cleverness to speak, and dangerous dames with world-shattering secrets. Dark assumes the title role from his novel, a sharp private dick with a penchant for singing classic doo-wop and rock tunes from the era.

Dark brings characters and situations that scarred his emotional development from childhood into his fantasy existence: his estranged wife, his two-timing mother, and even obscure bit players that paid him passing remarks on a bus. Even the ravishing Nurse Mills (played by the always stunning and eminently watchable Katie Holmes), who applies healing cream all over Dark's tortured body in the real world, is pulled into a fantasy sequence set to the tune of Mr. Sandman (salacious Internet types will no doubt grab sound bites from this sequence and post them all over Usenet.) As the film progresses, its focus delves less into Dark's physical healing as it does his emotional healing, coming to grips with both the pain he suffered as a child and his insistence on using it as reason enough for his own anger and aggression.

I enjoyed so much of The Singing Detective that it made the slower, more pointless sections that much more painful. Downey, whose much-publicized travails with drugs and incarceration cannot help but add a certain layer of poignancy to the role, is so impressive and authoritative as Dan Dark that he continues to cement himself as one of the more talented actors of his generation. His anger and bitterness is palpable, sorrowful, and believable. When he retreats into his fantasy world iteration of Dan Dark, Downey paints a slick veneer of artificiality over his performance that skillfully parallels the hyperreal, backlot universe of his imagination. Fine performances are also delivered by Saul Rubinek, Alfre Woodard, Robin Wright Penn, Jeremy Northam, the aforementioned Katie Holmes, Carla Gugino, and, playing the most entertaining and colorful characters of the film, Adrian Brody and the great Jon Polito. Even Mel Gibson, whose Icon Productions produced the film, does an excellent turn as Dr. Gibbon, Dan's therapist.

My main problem with The Singing Detective is that it at all times seems both abrupt and overlong. There are scenes that seem to be padded and non-essential, and others that rush the story along in a haphazard, somewhat unfocused manner. The constant speeding-up and slowing-down of the film runs havoc with its pacing and flow, making The Singing Detective appear disjointed and uneven. But these flaws are countered and, for the most part, outnumbered by some truly inspired sequences, which are so engaging and entertaining that, in the end, The Singing Detective works more often than it doesn't. It's a maddening, frustrating film, but ultimately a worthwhile one.  

The DVD