6. The Singing Detective (2003), Director - Keith Gordon

Dan Dark, the modern day author, has spent the last three months in a hospital, his skin an open sore. Dan Dark, the fictitious 1950s Singing Detective, is dividing his time between nightclub gigs and trying to solve the murder of Nina, a sex-worker who knew too much. Life and art mirror each other as the stories from Dan’s (pretty bad) books seem to come alive. But how much of the fiction is reality, and how much of Dan’s percieved reality is his own frantic imagination?

Robert Downey Jr portraits the warbling private-eye well, but he has the bitterness, guilt and anger of the hospitalized Dark down perfectly. A particularly touching scene has him breaking down and confessing to how great the pain is, only to have it intensified by his tears, stinging his face. His foil and salvation is Mel Gibson’s Dr Gibbon, who sees through Dark’s defences and helps him untangle his past. Stuck with a whore-madonna complex that has shaped him through the years, Dan Dark’s paranoia makes him see the same patterns and conspiracies time after time, and the way the movie utilises the same actors and motifs is both disturbing and amusing.

Here we have a film that could have been a mess of ambiguity, but with a great edit and nice pacing we see a simple yet engaging story unfold. The journey towards recovery is compelling and hopeful. Even though we never quite like the lead character, we still invest in him. After all, we can all relate to feelings of guilt and betrayal and succumb to paranoia. A strong cast (call outs for Robin Wright and Carla Gugino) adds to the quality, and we get some wonderful light relief in the shape of the two useless henchmen (Adrian Brody and Jon Polito) ”We never know what we’re doing”?. Fraser always finds Downey Jr to be a little over the top, but that seems to work for him here. The music numbers, though, are the stars of the show as we, the audience, get to take a break from the awfulness of Dark’s situation.

We were aware that this was a remake, (the original we have not seen) and having a quick look at IMDB we can see that the ratings for the series are far higher. Yet, while the film may offer more of a quick fix, neither of us are in a place right now where we could endure a more drawn out version of this harrowing story.

Does it make it into the cupboard? Yes