A number of years ago, I don’t remember how many exactly, I gave my students the option to argue what book they should read at the end of the final quarter. The best argument would win. The winner was the at-the-time new novel The Pale Blue Eye by Louis Bayard. I liked it, but some of the students took to calling the kid who made the argument “the Pale Blue Falcon” (Army insult) because it A) wasn’t the second place book The Giver and B) was 100 pages longer than anything else we might have looked at.
I’ll stand by the choice I made in the end, especially when I learned The Giver was aimed at an audience far younger than my students happened to be. Plus, The Pale Blue Eye was a pretty good book. Would the new movie, now on Netflix, be just as good?
Retired detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is living a quiet life in the Hudson River Valley near the newly established United States Military Academy at West Point when he gets an unusual request from Superintendent Thayer (Timothy Spall): a cadet was found hanging. It might have been a suicide, except someone removed the young man’s heart. While the Academy does have the means to investigate something like this, there are members of Congress who would just assume to end the Academy’s charter and want to keep it quiet. Landor seems to reluctantly take on the case, but he gets some unexpected help from an outcast cadet, one Edgar Allen Poe (Harry Melling). Yes, that Edgar Allen Poe.
The thing is, the case has already taken a bizarre turn. Livestock likewise have been found missing their hearts. Could there be an occult connection? Landor may not think so as he works with facts and science. Poe is more poet than soldier and tends to look into the symbolic. There are more than a few likely suspects, but Landor himself has issues with the way Academy officer Captain Hitchcock (Simon McBurney) seems to be putting restraints on the investigation, to say nothing of things everyone at the Academy, including Poe, seem to be holding back information for a variety of reasons. Will Landor and Poe get to the bottom of the crime?
OK, this was a fairly quiet movie in many ways, and for good reason as an air of mourning hangs over the film. Landor lives alone due to the unexpected death of his wife, and their only daughter left home for some reason. Poe has feelings for a local doctor’s daughter (Lucy Boynton), despite the fact she is visibly ill and engaged to another Cadet. What makes the movie is the performances of both Bale and Poe. Bale’s character is restrained, a man who doesn’t want to deal with any of this stuff but finds himself doing so anyway. He’s certainly not doing it out of any love for West Point. Poe, by contrast, is a bit more flamboyant in a very Poe-ish way. This is a young man who sees poetry everywhere, but also claims his poems are dictated to him by his long dead mother and thinks taking a date for a walk in the local cemetery is the height of romance.
But then as the movie starts to wrap up, it goes in the opposite direction for one very important scene with a lot of over-the-top acting. That’s not quite the end, but it feels out of place from the rest of the movie. It’s an important moment in many ways, but it also comes across as a bit wrong. It threw me a bit out of an otherwise good (but not quite great) movie. Then again, I distinctly remembered the end of the novel, so I might have lost something there. However, I think I would recommend the book before the movie. See this for Bale and especially Melling, but maybe read Bayard’s novel at some point too.
Grade: C+
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