Gotham (1988)

A down on his luck private detective (Tommy Lee Jones) is hired by Charlie Rand (Colin Bruce) a rich, nervous husband, to find his wife (Virginia Madsen), and tell her to leave him alone. The catch? Rand claims she’s dead.

A good helping of Film Noir, a touch of ghost story, and a bit of surrealism and you end up with something that doesn’t quite gel. Gotham (also titled The Dead Can’t Lie) is lacking in every department, but there’s just enough onscreen for me to wish there was more. I’d also like to know when the events in this film take place. If the wife died in the 1970s (if she died at all), then it isn’t unreasonable to think all this is happening close to the film’s 1988 release date. But everyone behaves, speaks, and dresses as if they are leftovers from a 1940s movie.

Gotham borrows heavily from Film Noir. There’s the slightly shady, cash-low private detective, a girl Friday, a questionable case with a lying client, and a femme fatale. I see writer/director Lloyd Fonvielle sitting on his couch for days on end, watching Humphrey Bogart, Dana Andrews, Lana Turner, Barbara Stanwyck, and Veronica Lake, and nodding his head saying “Ah, so that’s how it works.” Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that, and copying doesn’t do the trick.

It’s no secret that Noir became a joke by the ’60s and it is extremely difficult to make a good, pure one now. Fonvielle at least understood that, so he wove in a supernatural element. Probably. Everything gets so surreal in the third act that the only way to piece the plot together is to drop the ghost element, and assume the P.I. is insane. But that’s no fun, and I’m sure wasn’t the intention.

So, it starts as a slow, light Film Noir, fades into a plodding ghost story (still with strong noir elements), and then becomes incoherent. There are dreams and symbols galore with the fog machines from several hair bands pumping overtime. Along the way, the film pauses for a rendition of Danny Boy by a bum. No one does anything as he sings and sings. I like the song, but I also like Stairway to Heaven and I don’t think an eight minute Led Zeppelin music video at the hour mark would have been a good idea either.

With a few more script revisions, and an extra month of pre-production, Gotham might have been a nice, if not terribly significant film. Instead, there are multiple nude scenes with the lovely Virginia Madsen to interest viewers (and one with Tommy Lee Jones if that’s more your style), but not enough else.

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