Today’s quick review: The Singing Detective. Robert Downey, Jr. stars as Dan Dark, an irascible noir writer who is hospitalized with an acute skin condition. From his hospital bed, his mind escapes into fiction, replaying scenes from his first book with him in the starring role. Wracked with pain and delusion, he receives treatment from a psychiatrist (Mel Gibson) who helps him work through issues from his past, using passages from Dark’s first book to get at the heart of his distrust and sexual dysfunction. During his convalescence, Dark is visited by his wife (Robin Wright), the object of extreme scorn or greatest adoration depending on how paranoid he is feeling that day. Despite the successful treatment, the lines between Dark’s reality and his fantasy begin to break down, taking the movie to its peculiar ending.
The Singing Detective is a bizarre film. Robert Downey, Jr. does a great job of showing the restoration of a nasty misanthrope to something more nearly human. He gradually dials up the charm and goes from a detestable character to a truly likeable one. Likewise, Mel Gibson plays off him well in their therapy sessions, pushing him just enough to get a reaction without going too far. Despite their somewhat awkward character, these are the best scenes in the movie.
But as a whole, the movie is missing something vital. On paper it is a stylized look at illness, neurosis, and the nature of reality, propped up by a noir subplot and carried by good acting. On film it is a messy look at rampant paranoia and Freudian disorders. The audience may enjoy seeing the effects of Dark’s recovery, but actually watching him work through his disturbing issues provides little catharsis.
The stylization hits a sour note as well. The noir subplot lacks verisimilitude and resolution. It mostly serves as a vehicle for Dark’s repressed psychological issues and his constructed persona of a confident, well-adjusted detective. The puzzle of matching the novel’s imagery to traumatic incidents from Dark’s past is interesting, but the audience is not given enough information to guess ahead and the answers are mostly depressing.
The conceit of the singing detective also has little payoff. Dark’s detective moonlights as a lounge singer, the jumping-off point for a handful of musical numbers. But none of these are particularly memorable, and they only serve to needlessly exaggerate Dark’s descent into madness. The blurring of realities derails an otherwise credible recovery arc in favor of a more surreal ending. The extreme unreliability of the narrator makes it useless to track which facts are delusional and which have a basis in reality. Dark’s lucid moments are not sufficient to establish truth in the face of an ever-changing narrative.
Overall, The Singing Detective is a confusing and unsatisfying movie that is easily skipped. Its interesting premise and good acting largely go to waste in a sea of unreliable narration and Freudian analysis. There is a puzzle to the movie that fans of psychoanalysis or the original television series might get more out of, but for anyone else, the interesting aspects of the movie have been done better elsewhere. Watch Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, also starring Robert Downey, Jr., for a much more amusing take on a meta-noir story. Watch The Brothers Bloom for a much more fulfilling take on storytelling, freedom, and blurred layers of reality. Otherwise, steer clear of The Singing Detective. 5.6 out of 10 on IMDB.