The actor plays the legendary detective under the orders of Neil Jordan in the film that closes the official section of San Sebastián
Liam Neeson (Ballymena, Northern Ireland, 1952) arrived in San Sebastian as the final fireworks. His ‘Marlowe’ has closed the official section out of competition. Co-starring Diane Kruger and Jessica Lange, the film, which has distribution in Spain but no release date, adapts ‘The Black-Eyed Blonde’, the novel with which John Banville resurrected the iconic private detective created by Raymond Chandler. The Irish writer seemed like the right person, since the author of ‘The Sea’ and ‘Mrs. Osmond’ goes by the alias of Benjamin Black when he writes crime literature, specifically the saga dedicated to the Dublin forensic pathologist Quirke.
The actor, who made his film debut in 1981 in the great ‘Excalibur’, is a true star, including an Oscar nomination for ‘Schindler’s List’. The list of directors he has worked with is dazzling: Clint Eastwood (‘The Black List’), Sam Raimi (‘Darkman’), Woody Allen (‘Husbands and Wives’), Jodie Foster (‘Nell’)… The Qui-Gon Jinn of the ‘Star Wars’ saga can boast of having been under Scorsese’s orders in ‘Gangs of New York’ and ‘Silence’, was part of the Batman movies, featured in blockbusters such as ‘Love Actually’ and brought to life Michael Collins and Rob Roy.
Liam Neeson as detective Philip Marlowe.
All this was before his filmography slipped into the fields of action cinema, with a special predilection for revenge stories. ‘A thousand ways to bite the dust’, ‘Walking among the graves’, ‘Revenge’, ‘Revenge below zero’, ‘The protector’ and ‘The mediator’ belong to this last stage in Neeson’s career, who at 70 For years he continues to distribute tow as if he were a revived Charles Bronson. For something at the age of 14 he was already boxing. In San Sebastián he has appeared with the mustache that he will wear in his next project, ‘Thug’, by Hans Petter Moland, which can be translated as… ‘thug’.
His Marlowe is also skeptical and disenchanted as Banville’s Quirke, despite the Northern Irish actor’s powerful physique, who inherits a role that Humphrey Bogart, James Garner, Elliot Gould and Robert Mitchum have played throughout film history. He directs the Irishman Neil Jordan, far away from the times of ‘Mona Lisa’, ‘Game of Tears’ and ‘Interview with the Vampire’. As in ‘The Big Sleep’ and ‘Goodbye, Doll’, the plot starts with an assignment, which a rich and sophisticated heiress (Diane Kruger) makes our man: find her lover, who was supposedly killed by a car in front of a exclusive club. An excuse for the protagonist to dive into the corruption of the city that hosts the Mecca of Cinema.
“Philip Marlowe is a dream character played by extraordinary actors,” acknowledges Neeson. “Humphrey Bogart, Sterling Hayden and Elliot Gould, who was wonderful in Robert Altman’s ‘A Long Goodbye.’ I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never read Chandler, but as soon as I could I devoured all of his books on the Kindle. I have not felt intimidated by the myth or by those fantastic actors who have embodied it. The actor was seduced by the idea of working with Jordan again after four films together, including ‘Michael Collins’, and of reuniting with Jessica Lange almost thirty years after ‘Rob Roy’.
‘Marlowe’ is a very weak retro exercise that doesn’t save even a tired Neeson, who hardly gives him a hard time on a couple of occasions, nor some sharp, sarcastic dialogues, which are intended to be replicas of those used in the noir classics from the prose by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. It is inevitable to think of Polanski’s great ‘Chinatown’, which was also an exercise in going back to the past but with talent and means. Jordan shot much of the film in Barcelona because it gave him the Mediterranean feel of Los Angeles. Despite Xavi Giménez’s photography, the result looks poor and charmless.
Liam Neeson and Diane Kruger in ‘Marlowe’.
According to Jordan, the character of the perfidious oligarch is inspired by Joseph Kennedy, who bought RKO because he had an affair with Gloria Swanson. The filmmaker thus intends to reflect that Hollywood was the scene of all kinds of execrable sexual purposes. Liam Neeson recalled in San Sebastian the four years he spent studying Lincoln for Spielberg’s film at the time his wife Natasha Richardson died in a mountain accident. The role, in the end, went to Daniel Day Lewis.
Another character that has recently recovered is that of Qui-Gon Jinn in the series about Obi-Wan Kenobi on Disney Plus. Neeson pointed out that 25 years ago filmmaking was more complicated because digital effects were not as sophisticated as they are now. His friend Ewan McGregor, who then called him ‘Gin Tonic’, was also partly to blame for putting himself back in front of a green screen. “I only say three sentences in the series, but I didn’t want someone else to play my part,” he confessed. “I have also done it as a tribute to George Lucas, who once created an extraordinary world that today belongs to the culture of each country.”
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