"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore," begins Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven." The new movie of the same title opens on Poe (John Cusack) sitting alone on a bench. Poe is wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming of forgotten lore, until so weak and weary, he ponders nothing more. I mean, he's nevermore, no more; you know, dead. And there's a raven, never flitting, just sitting, perched above Poe's head. Perhaps it seeks a crumb of bread, but more than likely, it's because Poe's dead.
A title card flashes up. It informs us that the last day of Poe's life was shrouded in mystery. The movie ponders and wanders until you're weak and teary: O' where? O' where did Poe go? So this movie comes a rapping and a tapping with a storyline dumber than Larry, Curly and Moe.
Script writers Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare (methinks her surname may be assumed) fictionalize Poe's last days on the streets of Baltimore, Md., where he was found in a depraved state of delirium, repeating the name "Reynolds" shortly before he died Oct. 7, 1849.
Sounds promising, doesn't it?
"The Raven," directed by James McTeigue ("V for Vendetta"), starts off ominously. Fog and darkness envelope the great city of Baltimore. Horses clip clop along shadowy brick-paved streets. A masked murderer spins Poe's tales into visceral scenes of death and gore. The police investigation stalls until Detective Emmett Fields (Luke Evans) figures out that the murder scenes are grisly reenactments of Poe's stories.
As death and mayhem ensues, Poe rankles the commoners in the bars. He siphons their ale, he shouts out his poetry, and the rednecks manhandle him out the door. The film depicts Poe as a charming boozer hopelessly in love with a young heiress named Emily (Alice Eve). Cusack emits a puckish spirit, spewing off clever lines as the Baltimore bard of his time, and Eve glows with Victoria pureness of heart. She's dazzling, although the pairing seems destined to fail. The raven portentously appears to signal to us that all is not well in the lovers' paradise, although the telltale sign is when Emily's father (Brendan Gleeson) pulls out his revolver and threatens to shoot Poe if he does not leave his little princess alone.
But then something more grim, ungainly and ghastly occurs.
Edgar Allan Poe turns into an action hero! (GASP!)
With a billowy black cape draped over his shoulders, Poe comes to the aid of Detective Fields after the madman kidnaps his lovely Emily. Whatever spark of originality the film began with now gets swept into night's Plutonian shore by a whodunit investigation.
Mashing together story lines from "Phantom of the Opera," "National Treasure," "Sherlock Holmes" and the Ellery Queen television mysteries into a bloody pulp fiction, Poe and Fields painstakingly follow the clues until the murderer is unmasked—but only to Poe. Poe must deal with the devil to save his true love. (GULP!) The music swells out of control, because the filmmakers are truly mad and cannot restrain themselves any longer.
I had hoped that this movie would elevate Poe and his macabre material in the way that "The Hours" took Virginia Wolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" to soaring heights of imagination. But "The Raven" treats imagination as a felony, and the Hollywood explanation of Poe's death lacks the cleverness demanded of the subject matter.
But this film, in a brilliant, unintended way, does manage to snuff out the genius of the poet and stuff him into cinematic martyrdom.
So then there came a rasping on how to kill Poe's legendary lore. It's a film called "The Raven," steeped in red death and gore. Still your expectations, and allow the mystery to explore. But alas, there's only blandness there, and nothing more. And with your movie soul fizzled to the floor, a black bird croaks, "Never. Nevermore!"
The picture fades to black, and you walk out the door.
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