The Pale Blue Eye hits theaters on Dec. 23 before streaming on Netflix on Jan. 6.
Scott Cooper is one of the best directors of performance currently working, but he’s an exceptionally boring storyteller. Like many of his previous films (Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace, and Black Mass, to name a few), The Pale Blue Eye holds little by way of tension, meaning, or effective drama, despite its superficial allure. Set at the United States Military Academy in 1830, the movie — based on Louis Bayard’s 2003 book of the same name — follows widowed detective Gus Landor (Christian Bale), who sleuths out information about a mysterious murder with the help of a young cadet, a fictionalized Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling). However, the broad strokes of this premise are about as interesting as it gets.
Its languid 128 minutes begin in the dead of winter. A white sheet covers the skeletal trees of New York State, courtesy of cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi (a frequent Cooper collaborator, though his work on Joe Carnahan’s icy survivalist film The Grey is a good comparison). When Landor is summoned to West Point by senior officers, he goes unwillingly, though his hesitance is quickly set aside so the film can introduce its tale of 19th century occultism. A young soldier has been found hanged under mysterious circumstances, and to make matters even stranger, his heart has been cut from his chest.
Like the lead of any good detective story, Landor spots clues no one else appears to see, though he only has so much access to the Academy’s inner workings. So, he secretly avails of the assistance of one Private Poe, the not-yet-famous author and poet (who would, in fact, have been enlisted at the time). Poe is eager to help, even though he expresses it in roundabout ways; he’s more of an awkward eccentric than the alcoholic womanizer of Bayard’s novel (and of real life). Landor, on the other hand, is quiet and straight to the point, but what binds the two men thematically is their shared sense of loss. Poe claims, in a fittingly poetic way, to be guided by the spirit of his late mother, while Landor has also experienced loss of his own, though he plays his emotions much closer to the chest.
However, beyond the occasional dialogue exchange, the film’s spirituality seldom comes to the fore. The movie creates an effective atmosphere on the surface, with a requisitely frigid appearance and an eerie score from composer Howard Shore. But its narrative and aesthetics never leave the realm of the literal, despite dealing with occult themes, a haunted protagonist, and *checks notes* America’s most famous author of the macabre. Instead, it lurches from scene to scene sans rhythm or momentum, building a mystery that seldom feels mysterious because so few pieces other than Landor and Poe are ever in play. It lacks a sense of possibility. As the real Poe would have once put it, quoting Francis Bacon: “There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.”
The Pale Blue Eye has an effective supporting cast, including Simon McBurney, Toby Jones, Gillian Anderson, and Timothy Spall as a who’s who of West Point, and Robert Duvall in a brief but welcome appearance as Landor’s old associate. But none of these characters has enough presence or bearing to make a meaningful difference to either man, or to the overall plot. Landor and Poe pick up minor clues from time to time, surmising conclusions about other cadets from torn diary pages and various interviews they conduct. But it takes frightfully long for the film to develop any kind of active stakes — a second cadet eventually goes missing — or for the true nature of its cult happenings to rear their head.
Bale and Melling play put-upon men burdened by their pasts, but their stories rarely impact their present, beyond the moments they choose to reference their traumatic baggage out loud. That is, until the movie finally allows both actors to play deep within the emotions they’ve been circling — albeit briefly — thanks to a peculiar turn late into the runtime. Its nature is better left unspoiled, but you likely won’t be able to guess it from the outset anyway, mostly because it comes out of left field, and makes the whole exercise that much more of a head-scratcher in retrospect, hinting at a better and more challenging movie we never got to see.
The only truly creepy thing about The Pale Blue Eye is its own zombified existence. It looks like a movie. It travels in the body of one, with similar motions you might be able to recognize from afar. But a closer look reveals something uncanny — something dead behind the eyes, struggling to maintain the appearance of having a soul.
source https://www.ign.com/articles/the-pale-blue-eye-review