‘By your standard, every crime committed by a Christian will be a stain on Christ...’
Like Daniel Day-Lewis before him, Christian Bale is one of the few movie stars who has maintained an air of mystery. Before the age of social media and constant interviews, movie stars used to seem otherworldly, walking on rarified air. Bale is one of a dying breed in that respect. For that reason, any project that he lends his name to is automatically granted an air of intrigue. The Pale Blue Eye is sadly not the best conduit for Bale’s considerable talent…
At West Point Academy in 1830, a gruesome and seemingly satanic murder attracts the attention of world-weary detective Augustus Landor (Bale). Upon arrival, Landor finds an ally in the form of emo cadet Edgar Allen Poe (Harry Melling). As the violent murders increase, Academy leader Superintendent Thayer (Timothy Spall) and camp doctor Daniel Marquis (Toby Jones) become increasingly concerned. Meanwhile, Poe is attempting to woo the good doctor’s daughter Lea (Lucy Boynton). In true Poe style, he does this by taking her to a graveyard and ruminating on death and love.
That plot synopsis sounds like a lot of fun, right? Bale running around with Edgar Allen Poe solving murders. And in its best moments, The Pale Blue Eye is fun. Writer-director Scott Cooper perfectly captures the quiet desperation of army life in 1830. Everything is shot in shadow or in blues and greys, and it is pleasing that even the darker moments are easy to make out. Hollywood has a much-publicised problem with shooting in the darkness, but Cooper swerves this issue with aplomb. Bale is characteristically great throughout, at once menacing and likeable, and while Melling occasionally strays into Benoit Blanc territory with his exaggerated southern accent, he is mostly great, certainly capturing Poe’s unusual aesthetic. The problem here is with the pacing, the film seemingly races to a third-act conclusion, but then the unnecessarily convoluted denouement stretches things out for at least 20 minutes longer than is needed.
The Pale Blue Eye is not a bad film by any means, but it also isn’t great either. The frustrating thing is that it had all the elements to be the natural precursor to other gothic romps like Sleepy Hollow and Interview with the Vampire but in the end, Cooper and his cast fail to stick the landing.