The following is the beginning of Jim Ridley's film review of "Gone, Baby, Gone," a modern-day hard-boiled detective film directed by Casey Affleck's brother, Ben, who co-scripted with Aaron Stockard. Mr. Ridley is one of the many voices of Village Voice media and is a spoke in the wheel engulfing the cog that is Criticide.
“ 'Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid,” Raymond Chandler wrote in 1950’s The Simple Art of Murder, smacking the ascot off the drawing-room mystery and all its crime-solving dilettante dandies. 'He must be... a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.' ”
While I admire the ode-like nature of Ridley's cold-open, I'm frankly shocked at the confidence and bravado with which he spews out a mind-numbing inaccuracy. Raymond Chandler wrote "The Simple Art Of Murder," an essay, not in 1950, but in 1944, when it was first published in The Atlantic Monthly. The lesson here: Hire a fact-checker. Even Wikipedia got this one right. Ridley continues...
"Chandler was laying down the archetype of the hard-boiled detective, the hero with a thousand trench coats. He might as well have been summoning Patrick Kenzie, the dark-city crusader of Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone, who hails from the broken glass of Boston’s hard-knock Dorchester district."
Weak on creative observation, strong on formulaic structure, the on-line review goes on... and on... and on. Of course, his review, like some of the best crime novels and film noirs, closes with a callback, creating the intended, if clunky, unwanted reach-around. But Ridley fails to deliver, missing the opportunity to write the review in the style of a crime novelist. Yes, it might've been annoying, but at least it would've produced some kind of emotional reaction from this reader.
"The ending resonates cruelly in this time of war, as our national susceptibility to clear-cut options of good and bad keeps us from frankly considering (or avoiding) likely choices of bad or worse. But that is the scorched earth the detective walks. “It is not a very fragrant world,” Raymond Chandler wrote, 'but it is the world you live in.' "
Open and shut. By the book. One-two-three. With "Film Criticism For Dummies" in one hand, and a reprinted 1950 copy of "The Simple Art Of Murder" in the other, Jim Ridley has read but learned nothing from either. Struggling to be wise, Ridley seems to have read far too much how-to-write literature, killing whatever creativity he may once have had. Which brings me to this quote by the master of crime fiction:
"Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say."
- Raymond Chandler
