Susan Granger’s review of “The Pale Blue Eye” (Netflix)
It’s disappointing to be watching a gothic whodunit and suddenly realize: Who cares?
That’s the problem with “The Pale Blue Eye,” introducing dour Augustus Landor (Christian Bale), a tormented, widowed detective who has a cottage in New York’s Hudson Valley near the West Point Military Academy in the winter of 1830.
When a cadet’s body is found dead in the snow and then his body is brutally mutilated, reclusive Landor is recruited by Colonel Thayer (Timothy Spall) and Captain Hitchcock (Simon McBurney) to find the perpetrator and save the fledgling Academy’s tenuous reputation.
Questioning the victim’s fellow cadets, Landor befriends pallid, young Edgar Allen Poe (Harry Melling), an obvious eccentric who was a published poet at the time but had not yet established his literary reputation writing murder mysteries. Landor also becomes involved with a local barmaid (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who fills him in on some pertinent details.
There’s Dr. Daniel Marquis (Toby Jones), married to socialite Julia (Gillian Anderson). They have two grown children: arrogant cadet Artemus (Harry Lawtey) and ailing daughter Lea (Lucy Boynton), whom impetuous Poe is covertly courting.
And – on occasion – Landor visits an old friend (Robert Duvall) who seems to be an expert on satanic rituals and the occult.
Based on the 2003 novel by Louis Bayard that was allegedly drawn from real-life events, it serves as a Poe origin story but director/screenwriter Scott Cooper fails to establish any empathy either with Landor or Poe, making the bleak story-telling a bit of a slog. Curiously, since the setting is American, most of the actors are British.
The title comes from Poe’s famous “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843): “One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture – a pale blue eye with a film over it.” And the character of Augustus Landor appeared in Poe’s “Landor’s Cottage,” his final short story.
On the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Pale Blue Eye” is a florid yet frosty 5, streaming on Netflix.
