Producers: Scott Cooper, Christian Bale, Tyler Thompson and John Lesher   Director: Scott Cooper   Screenplay: Scott Cooper   Cast: Christian Bale, Harry Melling, Gillian Anderson, Lucy Boynton, Robert Duvall, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Toby Jones, Harry Lawtey, Simon McBurney, Hadley Robinson, Timothy Spall, Joey Brooks, Brennan Cook, Gideon Glick, Fred Hechinger, Matt Helm, Jack Irving, Steven Maier, Orlagh Cassidy, Scott Anderson, Mathias Goldstein and Charlie Tahan   Distributor: Netflix

Grade: C

Long on atmosphere but short on logic and excitement, Scott Cooper’s brooding adaptation of Louis Bayard’s 2003 historical mystery wastes an exceptional cast on a tale that grows increasingly silly as it plods to an exasperating conclusion.

The title “The Pale Blue Eye” is a phrase lifted from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and along with numerous other breadcrumbs those two anatomical references point to the solution of the convoluted whodunit in which Poe himself is a major character.  He plays second fiddle, however, to Augustus Landor (Christian Bale), the investigator at the center of the plot.

Landor was a celebrated detective in early nineteenth-century New York City, but retired into dour solitude in the Hudson Valley after the disappearance of his daughter Mattie (Hadley Robinson).  In 1830 he’s summoned by Captain Ethan Hitchcock (Simon McBurney) to meet with his superior, Brigadier General Sylvanus Thayer (Timothy Spall), the Superintendent of the nearby West Point Military Academy, and asked to investigate the death of a cadet named Fry (Steven Maier).  Fry was found hanging from a tree; even more gruesomely, his corpse was mutilated, the heart having been cut from his chest.  If not speedily resolved the case could be used by opponents of the academy to shut it down.

Landor, initially nonplussed by Hitchcock’s sudden arrival at his isolated cabin, agrees, and quickly embarrasses campus doctor Daniel Marquis (Toby Jones), who missed several clues during his examination of Fry’s body.  Over time, however, he wins approval from the nervous doctor and his oddly inquisitive wife (Gillian Anderson).  The couple’s children, on the other hand, are more enigmatic.  Their son Artemus (Harry Lawtey), also a West Point cadet, is an arrogant, preening type, while their lovely daughter Lea (Lucy Boynton) is reserved and fragile.

A heavy drinker, Landor frequents the tavern operated by Patsy (Charlotte Gainsbourg), sharing nights with her in bed.  It’s there that he meets Cadet Poe (Harry Melling), an effete outsider among his comrades, and recruits him as an assistant to collect information he’ll be better situated to learn than an outsider.  Poe insinuates himself into the clique headed by Artemus, and becomes infatuated with his sister who, it turns out, suffers from what’s called falling sickness.  He also reports to Landor on two of Artemus’ closest cadet friends, Ballinger (Fred Hechinger) and Stoddard (Joey Brooks).

They will be directly implicated in the turn the narrative takes into supernatural territory, as signs of Satanic ritual in Fry’s death induce Landor to consult an expert in the occult named Jean-Pepe (Robert Duvall, almost unrecognizable under ample face hair) and track down some genealogical clues that, along with a cryptic diary by Fry given him by the dead cadet’s mother (Orlagh Cassidy), leads to the apparent solution to not just Fry’s murder but a couple of others as well.  In the process Poe is barely saved from becoming yet another victim.

Yet with the mystery resolved, however implausibly, the script throws in a final curve as Poe reasons out that Landor’s unearthing of the complicated truth is still not complete.  Devotees of Agatha Christie as well as Poe, and particularly her groundbreaking novel “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,” will detect her influence at work here—though in reverse, as it were.

“The Pale Blue Eye” is visually striking, with the grim fortress-like buildings and snowy landscapes confected by production designer Stefania Cella saturated in moody blues by cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi; Kasia Walicka-Maimone’s costumes likewise cast a spell, as does Howard Shore’s melancholic score.

But the film never comes alive, remaining throughout limp and inert.  That might seem appropriate given its gloomy subject matter, but Cooper’s penchant for solemn, stately staging, accentuated by Dylan Tichenor’s lethargic editing, drains any suspense from the narrative. 

It also seriously afflicts the performances.  Bale reverts to his grimmest, most mournful mode, rarely exhibiting the intellectual spark that’s supposed to mark Landor.  By contrast Melling, who looks a good deal like the young Poe, is all eager affectation, overdoing the theatrical gestures and vocalism of the character.  After a pose of arrogant prickliness at the start Jones recedes into glum diffidence, while Anderson and Lawtey are both highly mannered and Boynton all twittering frailty.  Spall and McBurney can muster nothing but officious military sneers, but Gainsbourg attempts to add some sultriness to her brief scenes, though without much success.  The less said about Duvall’s feeble cameo the better.

“The Pale Blue Eye” has been handsomely made, but the labored tale it spins probably works better on the page than it does in this ponderous adaptation.                

Producers: Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Stacy Perskie Kaniss   Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu   Screenplay: Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Nicolás Giacobone   Cast: Daniel Giménez Cacho, Griselda Siciliani, Ximena Lamadrid, Íker Solano, Luz Jiménez, Luis Couturier, Andrés Almeida, Clementina Guadarrama, Jay O. Sanders, Francisco Rubio, Fabiola Guajardo, Noé Hernández and Ivan Massagué   Distributor: Netflix

Grade: C

It’s sometimes difficult to determine exactly the point at which directorial flamboyance turns into mere self-indulgence, or even if it does (does it happen in “Citizen Kane,” or “Touch of Evil,” or “The Trial”?), but by the end of Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Bardo,” you’ll feel confident in saying that in this case it has.  The Mexican-born director has always been prone to extravagance, but here he takes the proclivity to extremes, in terms of running-time (more than two-and-a-half hours, even after some cuts) as well as its feverish flights of imagination and pretention.  Even the subtitle, like the one he appended to his Oscar winner “Birdman,” cheekily underscores a claim to importance.

The film is yet another attempt to emulate Federico Fellini’s 1963 “8½,” a masterpiece of introspection that’s proven cinematic catnip for other directors anxious to engage in similar exercises in surrealistic self-examination.  As his surrogate Iñárritu presents Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), who left his career as a TV host in Mexico to go to the United States, where he became a celebrated documentary filmmaker; at one points a clip from one of his works is shown, in which an incarcerated drug lord called El Ajolote (Noé Hernández) discourses creepily on his relationship to the wider society.

The amphibian motif of his nickname is central to the explanatory context of “Bardo,” which is a term in Tibetan Buddhism referring to the state between death and rebirth, though in Spanish it means a poet or singer of tales (also applicable here).  One of the early images in the film is of Gama riding a Los Angeles commuter train with a plastic bag filled with water and a number of axolotls in his lap.  The sequence is resumed late in the film to present a very literal explication of the fractured cavalcade of memories and experiences that have intervened, introduced by the striking introductory image of a human shadow sweeping across a barren, rocky landscape—just the first of many extraordinary visuals contrived by the director and cinematographer Darius Khondji, all accompanied by an eerie score by Iñárritu and Bryce Dessner and an evocative sound design by Nicolas Becker and Martín Hernández.  (Eugenio Caballero’s production design and Anna Terrazas’ costumes are no less impressive.)

What comes in the long middle reveals several preoccupations.  One is Gama’s obsession over the death of his first child, a boy who—in the feverish imagination of his father and mother—is depicted as refusing to emerge from the womb, with the umbilical cord stretching down a hallway.  Gama and his wife Lucía (Griselda Siciliani), along with their grown children Camila (Ximena Lamadrid) and teen Lorenzo (Íker Solano), have never truly come to terms with the loss, but will finally achieve a sort of closure.

A second is the contrast between Gama’s love of his native country and his guilt over leaving it for greener professional pastures, and between the ease of his departure and the struggle of immigrants now to make it across the border.  Much involves him returning with his family to Mexico to accept an award.  On his way he hears a news report that Amazon is buying Baja California, and then he meets with the American ambassador (Jay O. Sanders) at Castillo de Chapultepec, where suddenly the battle that occurred there in 1847 between American forces and young Mexican soldiers explodes around them again.  Those Mexican soldiers will briefly reappear in a contentious scene toward the close when the family returns to LAX and a Mexican-American security officer (Omar Leyva) brusquely tells them they cannot claim the U.S. as their home.  Endemic class differences are also portrayed in a scene in which the family’s maid Hortensia (Clementina Guadarrama) is turned away from a pool at an upscale resort.

There’s also a particularly nightmarish sequence in which Gama winds through the streets of a city where pedestrians suddenly drop to the pavement, though not dead, and then finds a pile of corpses with Hernán Cortés sitting atop them; after he and the conquistador converse for a while, the corpses begin to rise and leave, revealing that the scene is the shoot of the very episode we’re watching.  A similar conceit occurs elsewhere, in an early sequence when Gama visit the set of a popular TV program called “Supongamos” (“Let’s Suppose”), hosted by Luis (Francisco Rubio), the colleague he abandoned years before, only to sit mute before a laughing audience as Luis lambastes him for, among other things, a pretentious film that from the description seems to be the one we’re watching.  Later it’s revealed that Gama never showed up for the interview as Luis comes to the awards party to berate the movie as “a mishmash of pointless scenes…It feels stole, plagiarized.”

In a deserted restroom at that same party, Gama is visited by the spirit of his dead father Usandro (Luis Couturier), and morphs a child, but with Silverio’s grown-up head on its shoulders.  (The visual effects throughout were supervised by Guillaume Rocheron and Olaf Wendt.)  When Silverio complains “Success has been my biggest failure,” his father’s curt replay is “Depression is a bourgeois ailment.”  Translation: “Get over it.”  Gama also visits his lonely, ill mother Maria (Luz Jiménez), enfeebled by dementia, who can barely remember the past.  But she joins him in a finale where he joins immigrants heading northward, who may or may not miraculously disappear along the way.

What is one to make of all this, which is only the tip of the iceberg in a film rich with hypnotic images but groaning under the weight of its own self-importance?  One might be inclined to agree that its mesmerizing but chaotic content is meant to reflect nihilistic comments that recur periodically along with way—“”Life is nothing but a series of idiotic images,” one character argues, and Silverio’s father observes, “Life is just a brief series of senseless events.”  Certainly the arguably random arrangement of scenes as edited by Iñárritu and Mónica Salazar will suggest to some that such is the case.

But it’s doubtful that Iñárritu intends “Bardo,” another of his magna opera, is such a dismissive way.  He has something definite on his mind, though the film raises so many issues without presenting them in a definitely hierarchical fashion that it’s frustrating to try to figure out exactly what.  One thing is certain: though most of the cast is just passable, Cacho spares nothing in his effort to represent the director to the utmost.  That his performance is often over-the-top as a result is perhaps beside the point.

“Bardo” is being shown on Netflix, which is a pity; some of us had the opportunity to see it in a theatre with a huge screen and state-of-the-art sound system, which is what it really deserves—because it’s as an immersive visual and aural experience that it primarily merits attention.