Scott Cooper has made a career of exploring the darkness of America. Whether its the criminal underworlds of the rust belt and Boston, the genocide of indigenous peoples, or the intertwined horrors of addiction and economic precarity in the Pacific Northwest, Cooper has an eye for the aspects of American life many of us would rather not consider and The Pale Blue Eye is no different.
The film, based on the novel of the same name by Louis Bayard, continues Cooper’s recent move into more explicit genre territory (after his western Hostiles and horror film Antlers) as it sets up a whodunit plot within the first five minutes. It’s the winter of 1830, and a cadet at West Point Academy has been killed and his heart has been rather skillfully carved out. Constable Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is brought in by the officers who run the academy to solve the crime and ensure another life is not claimed. In his investigations, Landor sees promise in the young cadet Edgar A. Poe (Harry Melling), who fancies himself a poet and offers his knowledge of the case to Landor freely.
The inclusion of Poe could become a distraction, and at first Melling’s accent work is a bit jarring, but the film doesn’t treat this as an origin story for Poe. Instead The Pale Blue Eye is emotionally centered on Landor and his grief over the loss of his daughter who ran away not long ago. Sadly, that emotional center is pretty well worn territory and sometimes makes the film feel like yet another detective story about grisly crimes and the hollow men who investigate them.
But that’s where the film’s impeccable atmosphere, and its genuinely surprising narrative twists and turns, save it. From the start the film is strikingly beautiful and moodily atmospheric as the camera slowly moves through and over the snowy forests that abut the Hudson River. The film’s exteriors are made up almost entirely of blue hues and every shade of black, gray, and white imaginable, while interiors are often beautifully candlelit with stark shadows cast across the actor’s faces.
The particularly gruesome nature of the crime also allows the film to offer some stomach-churning images of the corpse. The stolen heart immediately brings up questions of symbolic and potentially ritual motivations that are soon answered when more occult symbols are found near the academy. It makes sense that a film with Poe as a character would explore the supernatural, but the explicit connections the film draws to devil worship and European witch-hunters are wonderfully unexpected.
Another happy surprise is that this film centered on a military academy and the men who inhabit it includes some scene stealing performances from women. Charlotte Gainsbourg has a small but emotionally resonant role as the kind bartender who has a sexual relationship with Landor, and Gillian Anderson, as the academy’s doctor’s wife, is the best part of every one of the few scenes she’s in.
Sadly, the film trips over itself in its final moments with one last twist that undercuts the rest of the film and plays into some of the most obvious and disappointing tropes of the crime genre. The ending doesn’t undo the fact that most of the film works, but it does end on a disappointing note instead of a thrilling one.
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