Review of Marlowe (2023) by Hnestlyonthesly — 18 Feb 2023

Marlowe's script is disciplined under two hours, runs at a clip that just slightly outstrips your ability to comfortably follow, leaving you working out the character you've just met or the circumstances into which you've just been dropped. It does not treat you gently. It does not waste its breath with overlong explanation or trauma plot background. It does not always even wait for the laughter to die down before it launches itself into another brilliantly lumbering fight scene, another exquisitely weird car confessional, another unexpected meeting at a place you thought you'd never see again. For months, Friends, Wife, and I have been playing a board game which pits three detectives against a game master who controls the testimony of every NPC on the board in 1930s LA. Wife has been reading mystery novels compulsively for years, contains the motives of hundreds of paperback criminals and the B plots of dozens of dimestore novels. Everyone (except Wife) puts on terrible noir accents and grouses about the number of hats we've given to our suspects (a symbol for how well we've been able to detect their lying). We cheerfully brag about the evidence we have stashed in the trunk of our cars and ignore the complaints from one Friend about how many turns we've wasted at variously dirty-sounding nightclubs operated by the mob. So when I saw that there was going to be a film staring Neeson which might remotely capture all of that magic, I assembled the team. The corona of that shared experience hangs around our movie going experience. Phillip Marlowe (played by Liam Neeson) is an old dog, a private dick staring into the office of a much busier, better furnished office in the very first scene of the movie. The way we learn more about him is through the little we hear from his various contacts in law enforcement who caution him against pursuing this case. That slow drip of backstory is so rewarding to gather and pool as you watch him dig deeper into the rabbit hole. It reminds me in some ways of another film that took an aging actor and very consciously situated the action in the man's twilight years, Ian McKellan playing a Sherlock Holmes on his final case. For Neeson's Marlowe, his advanced years don't stop him from fighting altogether, so much as slow him down from beating the crap out of younger goons who underestimate his ability to throw a punch. Think Batman in Batman Beyond.

For a noir junkie, Marlowe has everything you could want and finds ways to twist some of those standard tropes: some interesting commentaries on sexuality and race, red herrings, McGuffins, action that bears an R rating, and a plot that does not lose itself in the final act. There are no dull moments and no dead time. Upon further reflection, I know that there is inevitably going to be a measured and thoughtful critique of the Latino representation in this film: the fact that Mexico is erroneously portrayed as the crime-ridden source of sex workers and hard drugs, that the only two instances in which racial slurs are used in the movie are reserved for Latino folks, that the only Mexicans portrayed are particularly nasty thugs or the victims of those thugs. Myopic takes on southern borders should take care to note that they are inviting more circumspect writers to pull the same kind of shenanigans by shifting story locations a few thousand miles north to the 49th parallel. Would the movie have been better if it had found a way to de-center the nastiness of those flat stereotypes? Definitely, but--and I know that "but" is doing more work than some people are going to be willing to tolerate--I hope that some of the people who would otherwise be turned off by the thinness of some of the characterization of Marlowe might take interest in a subtextually queer reading of the film.