The Pale Blue Eye (2022)

At 1830s West Point a jaded detective partners with Cadet Edgar Allan Poe

The Pale Blue Eye (2022)

Streaming on Netflix

Christian Bale is weary detective Augustus Landor in The Pale Blue Eye

A bone-deep cold chills you right from the start of The Pale Blue Eye, as if you’re stepping into an eerily off-center outpost that’s in America but not entirely of it.  The dark tale unfolds at West Point in the bleak midwinter of 1830.  Enormous snowy vistas seem to lock the U.S. Military Academy in splendid, forbidding, isolation.

Maybe too isolated.  Shivering cadets, blue helmets aloft, eyes front, bayonets upright, march as rigidly as penguins, but a creeping sense of disorder swirls in the frigid air, as if anything happening here could be swiftly buried and forgotten under vast expanses of ice.

Indeed, the unspeakable has just been discovered.  A cadet twisting in the snowy night wind has hanged himself.  Extending tragedy into gruesomeness, later that night in the room where his body is being held his heart is surgically, near expertly, cut out of his body and removed.

The next morning Academy Superintendent Thayer (Timothy Spall) hastily summons Augustus Landor (Christian Bale), a former New York City Constable with a reputation for hunting and facing down violent criminals.

Landor, three years a widower, and a recovering alcoholic, has retired to the Hudson Valley to settle on a small farm, hoping to leave murder and mayhem behind him.

But his reputation for steady nerves in the face of evil has preceded him.   Thayer believes the crime’s grisliness won’t shake Landor.  The Superintendent also urgently needs what he hopes Landor can give him, a prompt resolution.  Washington is hinting that a dragged-out scandal could put The Point’s future in jeopardy.

Writer-director Scott Cooper has trimmed Louis Bayard’s 2003 novel The Pale Blue Eye without sacrificing its swooning 19th-century romanticism.  Beauty, even poetry, Bayard suggests, can emerge alongside bloody ghastliness.

In 1830 Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling) was undoubtedly the Academy’s strangest, most literate, least disciplined cadet. Since the likeliest perpetrator of the heart-removal outrage is a cadet, Landor needs a spy within the young soldiers’ ranks to penetrate their code of silence.

He coolly selects Mr. Poe.  Not only does he have an eye for the exquisite detail – at age 20 he’s already a twice-published poet, albeit to no great public acclaim – but a feel for the way death can lure the fevered imagination.  Surely in part because Poe has just such an imagination himself.

The two detectives make an amusing, clever duo.  They crack the code of a note the dead cadet tightly clutched in his hand.  When another cadet is murdered, not only is his heart removed, but he’s also castrated.

Both men rely on each other to sift through clues, which are coming in all too slowly.  Did the first cadet hang himself, or was he hung – that is, murdered?

Harry Melling is the gifted, romantic young Edgar Allan Poe in The Pale Blue Eye

As they struggle to find a killer and a motive, traps are being laid for Poe without him realizing it.

He and Landor come to focus on the family of Dr. Daniel Marquis (Toby Jones), who performed the autopsy on the first cadet, his wife Julia (Gillian Anderson), as well as his son Artemus (Harry Lawtey) and daughter Lea (Lucy Boynton).  They’re all hiding secrets.

Poe is profoundly enchanted by Lea and believes the eyes of a beautiful woman have a special provenance in the cosmos. Lea’s are pale blue.  He ardently wants to prevent any harm to Lea.  But are she and her family as kindly disposed to Poe?

The cadet murder mysteries begin unraveling when this tormented family splinters, and as Landor gets to the bottom of their deceit, Poe’s life hangs in the balance.

The unspoken but ever-present comedy within all this bleakness is that Poe, besotted by the feminine ideal, seems not to have given much thought to, much less written about, the deaths of idealistic young men.

And before this story’s lies and deceptions are sorted out, he’ll get close to precisely embodying that kind of young man.

Poised delicately between shrieking symbolism and grisly realism, Cooper’s script, like Bayard’s novel, stays true to early 19th-century mores.

Back then science, in the practice of Dr. Marquis, and cultism, in the secret rituals practiced by his family, were not as decisively pried apart as they are today. Nature and the supernatural seemed closer together.

And within that borderland is precisely where Poe’s imagination took root and thrived.  That’s how this story tugs at the modern imagination.  The heart, then and now, is both a symbol of love and the ultimate sign of pulsing, vulnerable life.

Yes, that means the storytelling and the acting here verge at moments on the operatic, but little is downright shrill.  I sometimes wanted to laugh at these overwrought people, but I never actually did.

This is the kind of headlong romanticism that we freely allow 19th-century English writers like the Brontes or Dickens or Willkie Collins to indulge in but are reluctant to accept in all but the greatest 19th-century American writers, comfortably only in Melville and Hawthorne.

Bayard doesn’t remotely aspire to their moral seriousness, nor does Cooper, as writer or director.  They’re both entertainers.  And they draw on Poe for the sheer fun of imagining what might happen if his sense of the macabre were brought to bear on actual lost lives, not the ones his feverish imagination conjured.

Bayard carefully points out in an afterword to his novel that no cadets were murdered in the 1830s at West Point.  He’s evoking not the Poe of “Murders in the Rue Morgue” or “The Tell Tale Heart”.

He’s inviting us to consider the untried Poe, to see if the younger man could have wrested under control the tangled emotions he’d so piercingly convey later in his life.

And, of course, in 1830 he hadn’t yet mastered his own feelings about women, men, love, death, or much of the world, which he’d experience in often painfully particular ways in the years ahead of him.  This is Poe at the start of his artistic rise, ambition driving him even more than talent.

In truth, we don’t surrender to emotion – to what the 19th century called longing – to anything like this extent anymore.  Which is what gives this movie its license to entertain us with grisly spectacle, unfettered passion and the heroic unmasking of criminals.

Landor and Poe share a bond of trust as they pursue a killer in The Pale Blue Eye

Take the plunge, it’s saying.  Love extravagantly.  Hurt deeply.  Dare almost to the point of recklessness.  You might discover what could make your heart beat a little faster, your living a little braver.

Bale’s Landor is both gruff and haunted, not just by the loss of his wife but by the absence of his daughter, Mattie (Hadley Robinson), seen in flashback.  She’ll end up playing a vital role in revealing Landor’s pain, and it’s the jejune Poe who gets to the bottom of the weary, grizzled, despairing man Landor has become.

It’s one of Bale’s best performances.  Both Bayard and Cooper give Landor a Poe-like elusiveness.  Bale marshals just enough tenderness as Landor to make us think this cynical man can still love.  But his hardened resolve as a crime fighter is more deeply embedded in his outlook than we at first understand.

It’s always interesting to watch Bale take charge in a movie without taking it over.  He dominates the screen but doesn’t crowd out the other actors’ expressiveness.

And he certainly doesn’t outclass Melling, who all but steals the picture.  The buttery Virginia accent he bestows on Poe seems to gently mock the young man’s pretensions while also granting him a high moral seriousness.

We can believe that this Poe, ridiculously smitten as he is by the neurasthenic Lea, will go on to love and lose on a far more dreadful and wrenching scale, and will feel every sting down to his most deeply recessed nerve-endings.

We can believe that Melling’s Poe, with his large, piercing eyes and perpetually wounded and defiant visage, will always get back up when knocked down.

This is the young Poe, but he’s also the spiky, irritating, fascinating earlier version of the iconoclast that the later, careworn, despondent Poe might have looked back on for a bit of re-inspiration.  

Melling keeps us marveling at the Poe to come, not just the flailing, faintly ridiculous, outlandishly talented enfant terrible we see here.  He’s an incubating, just getting started, catch-me-if-you-can Poe, one I fully expect to remember.  Evermore.