The Pale Blue Eye review: Christian Bale chases down a chilly murder mystery
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Has Christian Bale ever met a dark horse he couldn't sell? Filmmaker Scott Cooper and his actor muse have now made three movies together over the last decade, all variations on a theme (or two themes, really: blood vengeance and tortured masculinity). The Pale Blue Eye, which follows their contemporary Rust Belt noir Out of the Furnace and 2017's brutal frontier epic Hostiles, has all the signposts of another Cooper-Bale special: bruised knuckles and battered psyches, death without mercy and even less levity.
The parched and wintry Pale (in theaters this Friday and on Netflix Jan. 6) duly delivers all that, with frostbite. The cinematography is grimly gorgeous and the austere, brooding atmosphere threaded with old-timey dread. But it also has a bright skein of offbeat whimsy running through it, thanks in part to a delightfully unbound performance by Harry Melling (The Old Guard), who nearly turns the movie into a weird and tender buddy comedy with Bale, before it all surrenders to deep-purple melodrama in the last act.
Scott Garfield/Netflix
To be fair, purple is pretty much the baseline for a film in which young men keep turning up ritualistically dead — particularly when one of their peers, played by Melling, is the Godfather of Goth himself, Edgar Allan Poe. His Poe doesn't yet look capable of growing a mustache when we first meet him as a young cadet at circa-1830s West Point, a cheerful outcast with a flutey Southern drawl and seemingly no natural aptitude for military life. Edgar isn't a direct witness when a classmate is discovered hanging from a tree one cold morning with his heart surgically removed from his chest, but he has a lot of fanciful theories he's eager to share with Bale's Augustus Landor, the veteran detective summoned from New York City to investigate.
Augustus, beardy and taciturn in a top hat, is a man of science, not poetry. He's also a widower who's lost his daughter, prone to taking in a pint or three of whiskey the local ale house when he's not enjoying the occasional company of a sympathetic barmaid (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Bonded by intrigue and alcohol, Augustus and Edward begin to form a tentative partnership, or at least a sort of unofficial crime club. When more bodies appear on campus, similarly stripped of crucial organs, the case becomes serial — and a growing embarrassment for the authorities, including the irritated colonel in charge (Timothy Spall) and the anxious local surgeon, Dr. Daniel Marquis (Toby Jones).
Marquis and his eccentric wife (Gillian Anderson, vibrating on high) happen to be the parents of one of the most admired students on campus, a swaggering golden boy named Artemus (Harry Lawtey); they also have a delicate, doll-like daughter, Lea (Bohemian Rhapsody's Lucy Boynton) whose charms are not lost on Artemus' peers, including young Edgar. (She in turn is beguiled, improbably, by Poe's sensitivity and sense of the macabre: "How well it sits on you, morbidity," Lea tells him admiringly, which apparently passed for flirting in the 19th century).
Cooper, working from the bestselling 2003 novel of the same name by Louis Bayard, builds a solid murder mystery out of Victorian scheming and icebox ambience (rarely has an entire cast looked so genuinely in need of heating pads). Until he loses his way in the cascading absurdity of the final twists, the movie is mostly a study in how good its two main actors can be: Melling's Poe, wearing his tell-tale heart on his sleeve, seems to melt something in Bale, whose dour detective becomes almost playful in his presence. A lesser actor might easily have mined Landor strictly for his shades of gray, the tragic-misanthrope cliché; this one simply lives him from the inside out. Bale's conviction, and his odd-couple chemistry with Melling, isn't quite enough to sell The Pale Blue Eye's loopy improbabilities in the end, but it's still a pleasure to watch them try. Grade: B
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