Liam Neeson Punches Hard in ‘Marlowe’

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Phillip Marlowe is among the most durable fictional characters from the last century. Streetwise yet adherent to his own ethical code, Marlowe leapt from Raymond Chandler’s detective novels to the screen in the 1940s. Humphrey Bogart memorably depicted the private eye in The Big Sleep (1946) as tough, sardonic, undismayed. In The Long Goodbye (1973), Elliott Gould played Marlowe as out of step with the times; the times changed again when Robert Mitchum played an aging Marlowe in The Big Sleep remake (1978).

Mitchum provides a precedent for Liam Neeson’s role as an elderly Marlowe in Marlowe. The setting is Chandler’s city, Los Angeles, in 1939, the year he published his breakout novel, The Big Sleep. The private eye works from an office in a low rent building where the sun casts long shadows through the Venetian blinds. He shows little interest and less surprise when an alluring femme fatale, Clare (Diane Kruger), pays him to find a missing person, not her husband but her lover. He looks on with wary eyes from his hard-edged face, lips pressed tightly around a cigarette. He offers Clare a drink and he has one too, straight, no chaser or ice.

Neeson’s Marlowe has already seen it all—more than once—and is startled by nothing as he goes down one rabbit hole only to rise from another. Nothing is simple in any good story derived from Chandler’s hardboiled fiction. Marlowe walks into a labyrinth expecting to find monsters. He enters a hall of mirrors reflecting overlapping lies and conspiracies. He stares through the iron gates of a private club where he would never be welcome, even if he wasn’t accusing the management of running a posh cover for crime.

He has gruff but relatively friendly relations with the cops in contrast to earlier movie Marlowes who kept arm’s length from the law. In this film, the LA police hesitate at the front doors of the rich and powerful and have learned to avert their eyes. But sometimes they are happy to let Marlowe, an ex-investigator from the DA’s office, crack the hard cases. After all, they have pensions to protect. A private eye has nothing to lose but his life.

Making minimal use of computer generation, director Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, Michael Collins) films lush subtropical landscapes enclosing the vast estates of the wealthy, attended to by small armies of servants. Some of the cinematography is as beautiful as colored neon on the puddle left behind by an evening shower. Based on a Chandleresque novel by contemporary author John Banville (aka Benjamin Black), the screenplay by William J. Monahan (The Departed) draws from elements of Chandler’s biography as well as his fiction. There is also a thinly disguised Joseph Kennedy, a powerbroker made rich by rum-running and proud of his new role as ambassador to Great Britain. 

Marlowe accurately reflects Chandler’s conception of his protagonist. This Marlowe doesn’t take money to drop the case. He doesn’t have sex with clients or women half his age. He’ll break the bones of any thug who crosses him but keeps his hands clean of the Hollywood Babylon all around him—the casting couches, the heroin, all the dirt the publicists worked overtime to conceal.

Jessica Lange is splendid as Clare’s mother Dorothy Quincannon, a retired silent film star wealthy from oil money and in cahoots with the thinly disguised Kennedy. Alan Cumming adds a marvelous cameo as a fey Southern gentleman mixed up with the “maladroit from sunnier climes,” as he calls the crime gang from “down in the land of sombreros.” Marlowe is unflappable but a bit weary throughout. As an LA sheriff’s detective tells him, “When you’re getting to be an old timer, it’s good enough to get out alive.”

Marlowe is screening at Marcus South Gate, Marcus South Shore and AMC Mayfair.