James Hynes

Can a noir film or book even be revisionist? When we talk about a revisionist western, we talk about a western that still has the same images as a traditional western—landscape, horses, gunplay—but their meaning is reversed, so that the flamboyantly heroic Custer played by Errol Flynn, say, in They Died With Their Boots On becomes the raving genocidal maniac of Arthur Penn's Little Big Man, or Henry Fonda's stoic and decent Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine becomes Kurt Russell's sexier but more murderously vengeful Wyatt Earp in Tombstone. The main thrust of the revisionist western is to reject the triumphal tone of the 30s and 40s and show the traditional heroes as flawed or worse, and to show Manifest Destiny as a bloody racial war.

I'm not sure you can do the same thing with noir. Is it possible to reject a pop ideology that already takes a bleak view of human nature, that already considers all humans to be weak at best, and vain, greedy, corrupt, manipulative, and violent at worst, that already rejects, in other words, a conventionally hopeful view of life? A revisionist noir, I suppose, would be have to be one where the regular guy hero—Robert Mitchum, say, in Out of the Past—would take one look at Jane Greer and head the other way, joining a church and marrying June Allyson instead going on the canonically doomed One Last Job. Or Burt Lancaster, when approached about pulling a heist, would go straight to the police. In other words, a revisionist noir wouldn't be a noir at all. The genre and its view of the world are stained irrevocably and irredeemably black.

But even if you can't reverse the worldview of noir without reversing it out of existance, what you can do, in order to keep the genre fresh (though fresh may not be the word) is update it and play with the archetypical settings and characters. This weekend I rented the DVD of a terrific Australian noir from 2005 called Little Fish. I'd almost rented it a couple of months ago, but while I was looking at the DVD box in Vulcan Video (one of Austin's two world-class video stores, the other being I ♥ Video), the guy standing next to me told me it wasn't very good, and, in some detail, why. Impressionable idiot that I am, I put it back, only to pick it up again this past Saturday, impressed by the cast on the box—Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving, Sam Neill—and unable to remember any of the details of why the film supposedly sucked. So I rented it, and now I have a bone to pick with that guy from a few months ago, because it's a terrific noir, one that stays true to the noir worldview but introduces some elegant variations.

For one thing, it reverses the gender of the protagonist. Noir's a genre that often depicts working class life in a (to say the least) unsentimental manner, and in Little Fish, Cate Blanchett is a 32-year-old recovering heroin addict who lives with her embittered mother and works in a video store in a Vietnamese neighborhood in (I think) Sydney. She's predictably astonishing in the part, banishing any memory of her Great Lady roles to portray a sad, nearly hopeless young woman who is equal parts self-loathing and grim determination not to fall any further. She's trying to get a bank loan so she can go into business for herself, with an internet gaming shop, but the banks keep turning her down because of her blasted credit history (all that credit card fraud she perpetrated when she was a junkie). Enter an old love, a strikingly handsome young Vietnamese guy who was her lover back when she was doing drugs and he was dealing them, and right away, you can see the classic noir set-up: sad sack, working class guy with a past who is about to be lured to his doom by a gorgeous ex-lover—only in this case it's not Burt Lancaster in a wife-beater undershirt, but Cate Blanchett in a pair of hip-hugger jeans, and it's not Jane Greer or Ava Gardner in stiletto heels, but Dustin Nguyen in a sleek new suit. The fact that it's a woman for a change who is scrambling to survive and making all the wrong choices for all the wrong reasons doesn't change the outlines of the story—things start bad and get worse, and the homme fatale turns out to be just as much of a liar and manipulator as the traditional femme fatale—but it makes it fresh and especially poignant. I don't know if it counts as a victory for feminism that a woman can now be the patsy in a noir, but it certainly counts as a victory for verisimilitude.

The rest of the cast is equally fine. Sam Neill looks exhausted and mean playing an aging gay gangster, and the Australian actress Nomi Hazelhurst is superb as the mother, who, like a Beckett character transferred to suburban Sydney, keeps going even though every relationship in her life, with her husbands and her children, has disappointed her on every level. If you know Hugo Weaving only from The Matrix or The Lord of the Rings, he's almost unrecognizable here, playing a former rugby star who has become, in his middle-age, a gay hustler and drug addict. His character doesn't quite have any dignity left, but Weaving brilliantly invests him with a deep and attractive melancholy. And the actor Martin Henderson, who was a mainly anodyne presence in the American remake of The Ring, plays Blanchett's crippled, drug-dealing brother here, and, again, is almost unrecognizable as a sad-sack, no-hope drug dealer wannabe.

Again, you'd find many of these same characters in any noir since 1945, but they are written and played here with unusual sensitivity and insight. Another element that isn't really a revision but still an interesting change is the setting, namely modern-day Sydney, photographed in those bright, candy colors that Aussie cinematographers specialize in. Sunlit noir isn't necessarily new—think Chinatown—and in the best noir tradition, the most harrowing scenes happen at night, but the bright landscape of suburban Australia makes a resonant contrast with the despair and desperation and conniving of the characters. The storytelling is also unusually layered and subtle; unlike too many American films, where every plot or character point is hammered home so the dimmest bulb in the audience can follow it, with this film you have to pay attention to figure out the relationships between people. And the plot (which is complex in the noir manner) proceeds as much by implication as it does by straightforward exposition.

Noir has always been a license for directors to indulge in striking visuals, and director Rowan Woods has a gift for eye-popping compositions, though never self-indulgently and always at the service of the story and characters. The superb script is by Jacqueline Perske, and while it starts with a traditional noir set-up, it does so with reimagined characters and a setting evoked with unusual realism. Best of all, while staying true to the grim worldview of noir, it doesn't end the way you think it will; while the characters in the last scene don't have any more cause for celebration than Burt Lancaster or Robert Mitchum do in the final reel, they've at least come to a clear-eyed awareness of themselves and each other that is bracing if not particularly encouraging. It's another example of a work of art that somehow manages to be grim and exhilarating at the same time.

So, to answer my own question, can a noir be revisionist—sort of, I guess. To return to my comparison with westerns, I guess the difference would be that with a western, the worldview may change, but the iconography stays the same, but with a revisionist noir, the worldview is enduring (dare I say timeless?) while the tropes and iconography can be changed.