The Singing Detective (2003)

Crappy film

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

The Singing Detective is surely not an easy movie to watch. Downey's cracked up skin makes it all the more difficult visually. Robert Downey Jr. plays the main character, Dan Dark. Dan is a writer of cheap, lurid detective novels, who is hospitalized for a severe case of psoriasis. He is shown to be in immense pain and is almost disabled from going about his normal routine due to the painful lesions. In the process he hallucinates to an extent that he cannot decipher the real from illusion due to which he is almost on the verge of losing his mind. He often lapses into a fantasy world in which he is the main character in his own novel. But soon the characters from the novel start to appear in the real world. We are taken on a journey into Dan Dark's dark & unpleasant mind? Downey, as always leaves his imprint as an actor par excellence. We meet Dan's wife, played by Robin Wright. Mel Gibson plays a rather strange psychologist who may well be able to help Dan if only Dan actually wanted to be helped. Doctor Gibbon helps Dan Dark deal with his bitterness that seems to have consumed him since he fell ill. Gibbon gets an insight into Mr Dark by reading his book, he then uses this to help Mr Dark on the road to his mental recovery. The movie is about how Dan Dark fights the demons he has created for himself and overcomes them to go on with his life.

RDJs Acting – Robert said in the interview on the extras that he was scared about playing that kind of noir gangster character as they are always so cool. Well Robert it is very safe to say you pulled it off. Playing two characters in a film can be quite confusing for some actors but Robert Downey Jr takes to it like a duck to water. In the words of the singing detective "am I right or am I right?"Doctor Gibbon - Another notable character is that of Doctor Gibbon played by Mel Gibson. Doctor Gibbon helps Dan Dark deal with his bitterness that seems to have consumed him since he fell ill. Gibbon gets an insight into Mr Dark by reading his book, he then uses this to help Mr Dark on the road to his mental recovery.Dan Dark – He can seem spiteful and evil with his seemly random outbursts of violet verbal abuse directed to who ever is nearest to him at the time but, he is aware of this change in his personality and doesn't like it. There are moments when you see the person he used to be before reverting to the hatred spitting being he portrays so well. He is offered medication to help him deal with the pain of his condition. This medication is tranquillizers, the pain is at such a high level but he refuses. Lets just take a moment to admire the man for this. That takes courage and so much strength, to make it though each day with such a high level of pain when ever you move a single muscle.By the end of the film Dan Dark does reassemble himself into a different person personality wise. Perhaps he takes some of The Singing Detectives personality qualities and some of his original ones. I personally like to think he is a mixture of the two characters he portrays all the way thorough the film. As if to prove this point Dan Dark puts on a hat that we see The Singing Detective wear at the end as he walks out of the hospital he has called home for the past months.Nicola Dark – Some credit has to go to Dan Dark's wife Nicola for sticking by him through his illness and those violet verbal outbursts. Although she doesn't visit him at the start of his treatment, this is understandable because she doesn't want to get into a verbal match with him or just stand there while he shouts horrible statements at her. As the film progresses and his treatment, both physical and mental, is working his wife starts to visit him more and their relationship gets back on track. I am sure that having his wife present also helps with his recovery as he seems happy in her presence.The one thing that I was disappointed about upon watching the film was the fact that we don't get to hear Robert Downey Jrs lovely voice singing in the film at all (he does however sing the song "In My Dreams" over the credits) I do understand however what look the director (Keith Gordon) was going for. I think I would have made the same decision as he did as the overall look of those songs fitting into the film does work. If you think about it from Dan Dark's point of view he would use the songs in his hallucinations as he knows them, that's with the original singers singing them not himself. Still I can't help but feel disappointed at the missed opportunity to hear RDJ singing.

If it weren't for the original TV series I fancy that this version of Dennis Potter's 'The Singing Detective' would be regarded as an unusual and interesting film, maybe with something of a cult following. But inevitably it is compared to the original series and can't help but shrivel in its illustrious presence.So why remake the 1986 TV series as a feature film? The original is one of the best works ever made for TV and it runs to almost seven hours. It could be that the producers wanted to bring the piece to a wider audience and that is laudable, but the time constraints mean that much of the original narrative is stripped away and with it goes most of the emotional power, leaving a peculiar and spare story about a bitter, misogynistic man who is hospitalised with psoriasis and who is haunted by feelings of guilt concerning the death of his mother. This means that fresh audiences of the story will probably see it as a piece of rather clichéd psychodrama made interesting only by its visceral dialogue and quirky dream sequences, rather than as the masterpiece it is. Maybe if the producers were really committed to the work they would have added another 30 minutes to the film to give it a better chance of success as a work of art. I suspect a half-hour more running time wouldn't have saved it but it would have allowed more material from Dan Dark/Philip Marlow's childhood to be included, for that is where the emotional core of the work lies. The fantasy sequences are meaningless without reference to the real emotions that Dan Dark has left behind. This lack of context drains the film and its characters of meaning and it is left just being quirky and slightly interesting; a sort of puzzling crime scene. The question being: who stole the story's soul, and where has it been stashed? In parts, RDJ's performance is very good (he excels hamming it up as the fictional detective of the title), but in parts it slips, and generally the acting comes across as more mannered than the British TV original (makes one appreciate just how great that cast were). In particular Mel Gibson , in dodgy prosthetic comb-over, is rather grating.The finger-prints of the Hollywood studio can be found all over the cinematic crime-scene. The songs should have stayed in the 1940s. Shifting them to the 1950s seems like an attempt to make them have more commercial appeal and perhaps allow RDJ to look a bit more cool when lip syncing - which rather misses the point of the songs. He gives the game away when he actually sings a song over the end credits - I bet Dennis Potter didn't put that into his screen adaptation - more likely it was RDJ's agent. It has the effect of eradicating any lingering sense that you've been watching a drama. Of course by the time the credits are rolling you've already been served up an ending even more anodyne than the problematic ending of the original, with RDJ strolling out the hospital looking like he's just got back from a two-week vacation in Florida.There are some well crafted scenes but ironically the film looks rather small and studio-bound compared to its TV predecessor. I think this is partly because of the originals' brilliant direction by Jon Amiel. It was shot in film often in wonderful locations such as the Forest of Dean and so even cinematically it was a hard act to follow.So many considerations make one realise what a doomed artistic enterprise this was. Potter was at his most brilliant when writing about the things he was most familiar with, especially the Britain of the 1940s and 1950s with its repressive class system, and his childhood in the Forest of Dean. Removing this cultural setting (along with 5 hours of complex interwoven imagery) renders The Singing Detective impotent. I can't help but think he knew this - and I'd also like to believe that any adaptation he handed over was hacked to pieces in the making of this film. It may also be that he wanted to leave an extra financial legacy to his family, and handing over his most celebrated work to Hollywood was the best way of accomplishing that end.My plea to first-time viewers of The Singing Detective is: do not be put off by this feature film version. Please, please watch the original! It's breadth is enormous and it will make you think and weep like the best art should.

I was 24 when the BBC screened Dennis Potter's 6-part series The Singing Detective starring Michael Gambon as a hospitalised psoriasis sufferer. I watched it avidly, of course, because of the extensive outcry against it: notoriety was ever good for the box office. And I confess that I was too young and inexperienced to properly comprehend its strange and beguiling mix of real life, fantasy, fever dreams, flashback, pastiche mimed musical numbers, and the meaning and purpose of the way they were interwoven.17 years later, Hollywood films a Potter-scripted revision of the piece, substantially shorter, transplanted to the USA, and brought forward in time some years. I can't really compare them, because my recollections of the TV piece are sketchy.So I am commenting solely on this movie. It retains the mix of the original, but it is substantially easier to come to terms with what is being done: what is fever, what is imagination, what is recollection, and why each section is presented in that way. Robert Downey Jr as the protagonist (here renamed Dan Dark from the Philip Marlow of the original, each name having its own significance) as hugely impressive, but everyone shines.And the makeup....