4 minute read
Screens: The Pale Blue Eye
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Saturday 1/21
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etc.
Family Studio Day. Enjoy free art materials, prompts, and coloring pages. Free, 10am. Second Street Gallery, 115 Second St. SE. secondstreetgallery.org The Goonies Movie Party. Are you good enough? $14, 1pm. Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, 5th Street Station. drafthouse.com The Royal Tenenbaums. A clan’s estranged patriarch loses his home and learns that his ex-wife plans to remarry. $8, 7:30pm. The Paramount Theater, 215 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. theparamount.net
Sunday 1/22
music
Brady Turner. Enjoy winter at the winery with live music. Free, 1pm. Eastwood Farm and Winery, 2531 Scottsville Rd. eastwoodfarm andwinery.com Night Moves. The Minneapolis-based quartet’s psychedelic new song “Fallacy Actually,” is a head-spinning swirl of layered synths, harmonica, and guitar. $15-17, 8pm. The Southern Café & Music Hall, 103 S. First St. thesoutherncville.com The Highway Department. A new duo featuring singer-songwriter Doug Bishop and drummer David Jacobs. Free, 1pm. The Batesville Market, 6624 Plank Rd., Batesville. batesvillemarket.com Tyler Burkhardt. Acoustic guitar. Free, 2pm. Glass House Winery, 5898 Free Union Rd., Free Union. glasshousewinery.com
etc.
Frozen Sing-Along. Join Anna as she sets off on an epic journey—with mountain man Kristoff and Olaf the snowman—to find her sister Elsa. $8-10, 2pm. The Paramount Theater, 215 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. the paramount.net
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the
King (Extended Edition). The journey draws to a close. $10, 1pm. Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, 5th Street Station. drafthouse.com
Tuesday 1/24
music
Thunder Music Karaoke. Sign up to sing or just enjoy the show. Free, 9pm. Holly’s Diner, 1221 E. Market St. 234-4436.
Tunesday Tuesdays with Josh Mayo and
The House Sauce. Local and regional acts hit the stage. Free, 9:30pm. Rapture, 303 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. rapturerestaurant.com Vincent Zorn. Olé. Free, 7pm. The Bebedero, 225 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. the bebedero.com
words
The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times. Discuss Wild Virginia’s January book club read, by Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams. Free, 7pm. Online. wildvirginia.org
outside
Playdates at the Playscape. See listing for Friday, January 20. $20, 9:30am. Wildrock, 6600 Blackwells Hollow Rd., Crozet. wildrock.org
etc.
Poe at heart
NETFLIX
In The Pale Blue Eye, Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) enlists a young Edgar Allan Poe to help solve a murder at West Point.
By Justin Humphreys
arts@c-ville.com
Writer and director Scott Cooper’s film of Louis Bayard’s novel The Pale Blue Eye is a reasonably engaging American Gothic mystery. It offers visually appealing historical fiction and, at just over two hours, doesn’t overstay its welcome. But with a mediocre script and lead performances that don’t equal its pictorial loveliness, the film only sporadically delivers on its promising premise.
Set in 1830 in the Hudson River Valley, former detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is enlisted by West Point to solve a cadet’s ritualistic murder. Landor becomes acquainted with cadet Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling), taking him on as his assistant and sleeper agent within the student body. As the murders continue and Landor weaves his way through a sea of red herrings, insidious secrets begin to reveal themselves.
The basic plot device is clever: Poe, the future inventor of the modern detective story doing actual sleuthing. It’s not Poe’s first appearance as a crime-solver on film— The Man with a Cloak explored the same conceit—but The Pale Blue Eye really owes a debt to Shakespeare in Love. Throughout the film, we see Poe encountering flashes of his eventual masterpieces. The Tell-Tale Heart is the most obvious, as is Augustus Landor’s name, which Poe openly says inspired his immortal Auguste Dupin. There are other similar allusions that are spoilers.
The script is fine and diverting, but it gets convoluted. It suffers from too many secondary and tertiary characters, which prevents all but a few of them from being fully fleshed-out, and from transcending clichés like the stiff-backed military school commandant. Likewise, some of the dialogue is excruciatingly blunt, like Landor’s rant at West Point’s chiefs about their soul-crushing regimen. But beyond these flaws, some of the characters work well, and the audience is, at times, cleverly misled.
Like many current movies, the below-theline talent is superior to the script. The cinematography nicely evokes the requisite period feel with its brownish, appropriately dreary color palette. The moody lighting in the 19th-century homes and taverns is particularly noteworthy. The costumes, production design, and overall creation of the film’s milieu are very good.
As far as the cast goes, the two leads are the only drawbacks. Bale spreads his artificial edginess with a wide brush. His gruff, mumbled, syncopated delivery gets tiresome quickly. And although Melling almost supernaturally resembles Poe, his Virginia accent is affected, and he overplays the great writer as an excitable oddball. Neither performance is terrible—they just needed reining in. Meanwhile, the supporting players appear to be having a ball, and their enthusiasm registers well on screen. Gillian Anderson shines as the neurotic Julia Marquis, wife of West
The Pale Blue Eye
R, 128 minutes Netflix
Point’s physician (well-played by the reliable Toby Jones). Charlotte Gainsbourg and Timothy Spall, among others, perform admirably. Robert Duvall has a small but critical role as Jean Pepe, an elderly antiquarian.
All in all, The Pale Blue Eye adds very little to historical fiction, or to the cinematic Poe canon. It’s worth watching for its visual attractiveness and has its moments, but don’t come expecting a story of Poe-like quality. This is no Murders in the Rue Morgue, and Cooper’s tale runs short on both mystery and imagination.
