Devil in a Blue Dress
First screened in March 2002 / Most recently screened and reviewed in August 2024
Director: Carl Franklin. Cast: Denzel Washington, Tom Sizemore, Jennifer Beals, Don Cheadle, Mel Winkler, Lisa Nicole Carson, Jernard Burks, Joseph Latimore, Albert Hall, Maury Chaykin, David Wolos-Fonteno, Terry Kinney, Beau Starr, Don Roselius. Screenplay: Carl Franklin (based on the novel by Walter Mosley).
I'm glad the popular and critical profiles of Devil in a Blue Dress have grown over the years since its box-office stallout in 1995, when I think it got squelched a little by the second week of Seven. The marketing made the movie look a little aesthetically rarefied for a weekend-night whodunit, but the Landmark audience, pulled that same weekend toward To Die For, didn't quite embrace it as theirs, either. Don Cheadle's performance as Mouse—one of the most erratic wingmen in the noir tradition, and in some ways an id projection of the almost too self-conscious protagonist Easy Rawlins—at least took on a life of its own as a point of reviewers' adulation and a solid awards magnet, just shy of an Oscar nom. Cheadle's work is really strong; he's like that subtly frayed electric cord on your old toaster that you're worried might kick the bucket at any second, but you're just as worried might light the whole kitchen on fire.
To Cheadle's great credit, he doesn't try to steal the movie with an outsized, unpredictable character that easily could have invited that. Director Carl Franklin also shows a confident hand in letting us lean in with nervous interest to this peripheral character, who barely emerges until the hour-mark of a 102-minute movie. Our one real exposure to Mouse up to that point is a bracingly weird moment of film grammar: a contained shrapnel-blast from Easy's memory, evoking a felonious errand in which Mouse dishonestly involved him in another life and a different state, conveyed on screen through a series of disorienting cuts so quick they might actually be superimpositions, hot to the touch but gone before we've made sense of them. We not only instantly want to know more about this backstory, we're primed to expect more cunning montage and stylistic panache from Franklin.
For my money, we don't get nearly enough of that. The movie does sustain a few major virtues throughout, especially the handsomely hard-boiled and almost cliché-free photography of Tak "Yes, Mr. Lecter" Fujimoto and the portrait of black, working-class, small-homeowner Los Angeles in the late 1940s, which would be flavorful and intriguing enough if it weren't also so beguilingly rare. But Devil in a Blue Dress for me is a textbook example of a movie that's got plenty of books that secure your interest but too many problems or imbalances to really cohere, or to come near its potential.
The screenplay suggests an intricate novel that's been too much condensed, either by runtime mandate or an insufficient budget or distrust in the audience, or all three. Twists, new subplots, shadowy encounters, and he's-good no-he's-bad no-he's good reversals transpire in almost every sequence, such that we too rarely get to savor or weigh the implications of what we know now before being asked to rearrange that knowledge yet again. One major character has a secret that is just impossible for me to understand as a secret, to the audience or to the characters in the film. It's also the rare case of a movie that's let down a little by casting Denzel Washington, for all his characteristic economy and sangfroid, and despite how interesting he is when he works out from moral gray zones, and despite his grabbing that sleeveless white T-shirt like a Heisman-level receiver and running it 90 miles into the opposite end zone. Damn, Denzel! Damn, Sharen Davis!
So it's hardly the case (is it ever?) that he's weak as Easy, but this actor has stayed conspicuously distant from his characters' sexual desires or erotic impulses for almost his entire filmography, and his lack of engagement with that side of human experience is a real liability in this narrative, and arguably for the whole noir genre it reanimates and hopes to complicate. He's also saddled with some voiceover narration that I wish were struck entirely, thats been mixed in a weird way that floats even more than narration usually does over the rest of the soundtrack and the story world, and where Washington sounds awkward and unconvinced (and more like Washington than Easy).
I see more missteps than these in Devil, from the thin performance by Jennifer Beals in an important role to a series of deaths that don't hold the impact they might have, because the characters they implicate and the subplots they semi-conclude never took off the way they needed to. (One off screen death is very much an exception, truncating a performance and plotline so vivid and thorny that the movie seems to have miscalculated by dispensing with them so early. I mean the one that involves a close-quarters infidelity and a letter inside a Bible.) It's also possible that I just don't jive completely with Carl Franklin's artistry, since I found Devil sort of there and not there in a similar way to One False Move, his 1992 career-igniter that also seemed to me a little structurally and narratively misshapen, unevenly acted, and less dextrous or ambitious in parsing its own racial and gender dynamics than I'd hoped, as interesting as they were in concept. I guess I'm saying I kind of get why initial audiences weren't all the way sold, though I also understand why Devil has been inspiring real devotees since the time it bowed. And I'd rather see it overpraised a bit (to my mind, at least) than languish in near-obscurity. Grade:B–
