During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in the springtime of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone through a particularly dreary stretch of midtown when I fearfully decided to pay a call upon the House of Screenings.
I suffer, you see, from a peculiar derangement. What some may call a bright color, I find garish; what others nod at as pleasing music, I shrink from as discordant. Fault I find with everything, snarling at the prettiest of players, fleeing theaters with my hands clapped over my eyes.
I am, I confess, a critic.
So, of course, was Edgar Allan Poe, and a rather vituperative one. As well as being one of the great dark geniuses of American literature, a singular talent who created a nightmare world of hidden desires, consumptive brides, loathsome putrescence and endless melancholy.
So it was with some trepidation that I entered this particular picture show, expecting to see the tortured poet transformed into some callow matinee idol with pomaded hair and violet-scented handkerchiefs.
But “The Raven†is truer than that. Its Poe is a mostly drunken reprobate who sobers up only when he realizes there’s a murderer rampaging through Baltimore. A murderer who has taken his ideas â€" razor-sharp pendulums, premature burials â€" from Poe’s tales.
And then takes Poe’s love, too, and threatens to slaughter her unless Poe, creator of the detective tale, solves this real mystery.
There is a danger here of wandering into the steampunk, pop-junk territory of the recent “Sherlock Holmes,†with Poe suddenly a master of fisticuffs and fencing, swinging from chandeliers while firing off fanciful Victorian weapons. To its great credit, “The Raven†avoids that.
John Cusack makes a realistic, nicely sardonic and properly pasty-looking, Poe. He holds a gun precisely twice during the film; once he drops it, and the second time he fires and misses. Repeatedly. (Perhaps this is the true reason the man was drummed out of West Point.)
Unfortunately, the characterization is far more accurate than the rest of the movie, which tries to pass off Belgrade and Budapest as Baltimore, litters the dialogue with anachronisms and has someone offhandedly discussing novels that Jules Verne had yet to publish.
These are small indignities; more grievous is the film’s lack of dramatic tension. It lingers intolerably on some inessential scenes, rushes through others, and fails to provide any motivation either for Poe’s devoted (albeit fictional) love, or the film’s archvillain. Most of the players remain almost defiantly uncharismatic.
Not so Cusack, at least, whose performance as the dissolute genius is fierce and full-blooded. He’s a lovely Gothic sight, sweeping down those cobblestone streets in his cape; there’s real bite and brio to his attacks on “hacks†like Emerson and Longfellow. (As I said, as a critic, Poe was nothing if not unsparing.)
Which is why, dear reader, I fear he himself would not spare this rather thick-fingered attempt at re-creating the delicate frissons of his tales â€" and immediately secrete it, if not beneath some worm-eaten floorboards, then at least deep within the middle of your Netflix queue.
Ratings note: The film contains gory violence and drug and alcohol abuse.
'The Raven'
(R) Relativity (111 min.)
Directed by James McTeigue. With John Cusack, Alice Eve, Luke Evans. Now playing in New Jersey.
TWO AND A HALF STARS
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