Thursday, November 20, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: Skin flick

The Singing Detective is a muddled condensation of a masterpiece

By Jeannette Catsoulis

Shortly before his death from pancreatic cancer in 1994, British dramatist Dennis Potter gave a final, lengthy interview to the BBC. What I remember most clearly about the interview is Potter's defiant chain-smoking of a series of cigarettes that had to be strapped to his twisted, useless hand. The image recalled the fact that, when writing The Singing Detective--released as a six-hour television series in 1986--Potter was able to do so only with his pen secured in exactly the same fashion.

A brilliantly original writer, Potter suffered from a rare disease called psoriatic arthropathy, which covers the skin with suppurating sores and painfully attacks the joints. Probably with glee, he passed the affliction on to Detective's tortured protagonist, a writer of pulp thrillers he called Philip Marlow, who lies festering in a hospital bed while medical staff smear him with gooey creams and exhort him to buck up. But Marlow--filled with fury, self-pity and medication--begins to hallucinate, and, in an attempt to save his sanity, begins to write a screenplay from one of his out-of-print novels. Because he can't hold a pen, he must compose in the seething mass of paranoia and fantasy that is his head.

Eight million viewers tuned in to the series, which was dazzlingly directed by a young Jon Amiel (Entrapment) and starred a gloriously enraged Michael Gambon. Sadly, Keith Gordon's remake is a frantic, chopped-up mess. Though working faithfully from a screenplay written by Potter himself two years before he died, this gifted director (Waking the Dead) has been compelled to cram six hours of rich narrative and psychological subtext--a feverish brew of illness, psychotherapy, guilt and sexual disgust--into 109 minutes. Led by Robert Downey Jr., now called Dan Dark, The Singing Detective's lacerated storyline struggles to make any kind of sense, flitting hyperactively among four different scenarios: the clinical glare of the hospital, the bleached dustiness of Dark's childhood memories, the stylized noir of the detective story and the woodenly staged song-and-dance numbers that break out whenever Dark loses his fragile grip on reality.

None of it works. Though Downey--in his first film since jail and rehab--is magnificent, and Robin Wright Penn gives a lovely performance as his long-suffering wife, The Singing Detective is a movie gasping for air. Everything feels compressed: the ideas, the feelings, the very movements of the actors themselves. The character of Dark, whose mental disorders are as impressive as his intellect, is so over-the-top he needs room to inhabit more than one dimension. The original series showed a man whose past and present, fiction and reality, bled into one another and stubbornly resisted disentangling--creativity warped by Oedipal guilt and emotions twisted by a mother's promiscuity. But this new Detective is all flash cards, plot points blinking in surreal succession like the film's parade of celebrity cameos, from the major (Mel Gibson as a balding therapist) to the minor (Katie Holmes as an improbably innocent nurse).

Potter's work, which frequently confronts the complexity of human sexuality and is unafraid of the grotesque, has always been controversial. (His 1976 play, Brimstone and Treacle, was banned by the BBC for 11 years because it depicts the satanic rape of a brain-damaged girl.) The Singing Detective is no exception, delving heartily into Dark's perverted view of women with a revealing patient/therapist game of word association: "Woman." "Fuck." "Dirt." "Death." The problem is there's nothing beyond the neuroses; in place of Marlow's fully formed, brilliant and vividly disturbed mind we have only Dark's misogyny and self-loathing--neither of which allows us to access the living human being beneath the dead skin.