Like a bizarre fairground ride, the late Dennis Potter invites you inside the twisted mind of a writer aboard a spiralling train of thought in a script adapted from his own landmark 80s TV series.
"GENRE-BENDING FANTASY"
Potter crafts a brilliantly self-conscious, genre-bending fantasy. But within the film, it's crime scribe Dan Dark (Robert Downey Jr) who's the brains of the outfit.
Gangsters in fedoras stalk the back-alleys of his mind while he lies in a hospital bed ravaged by psoriasis. In this noir landscape, he is the eponymous gumshoe, who shounds sushpiciously like Humphrey Bogart, and acts out deep-seated neuroses.
He casts his wife (Robin Wright Penn) as femme fatale, while his mother (Carla Gugino) plays a tart-with-a-heart. Arch villain Mark Binney (Jeremy Northam) is another face from Dark's childhood, but his innermost demons pursue him in the form of wiseguy double-act First Hood and Second Hood (Adrien Brody, Jon Polito).
"ODDBALL DELIGHT"
Playing the tortured soul, Downey rivets the eye - a feat considering the unsightly make-up job. Threading two distinct performances with an instinctive flippancy, he's also the perfect mouthpiece for Potter's bone-dry humour.
As his ruffled psychotherapist, Mel Gibson is an oddball delight. Like a wise old owl, he perches on Downey's shoulder with all-seeing eyes unnervingly magnified by milk bottle spectacles.
Alas, even with the breadth of a cinema screen, director Keith Gordon still manages to make this adaptation feel like a television play. He shoots the hospital scenes on sets that look like they could fall over in a stiff breeze, successfully imposing a sense of claustrophobia, but then failing to open out the action in crucial musical sequences.
Frustratingly, what could have been a richly diverse cinematic experience never fills the scope of Potter's original vision. But even with its faults, Gordon's The Singing Detective will haunt the darkest corners of your mind long after the curtain falls.
The Singing Detective (2003)
