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| Spoiler alert - the raven doesn't do much, really |
I found this film immensely enjoyable because of its silliness It doesn't so much play fast and loose with history and biography as nail them - still living, natch - into a coffin and chuck them into the Maelstrom. For a start, casting the imposing Cusack as Poe is a bold decision, much like offering us James Corden as Conan the Barbarian. Cusack bears a passing resemblance to Poe, but that's largely down to facial hair that does some good method acting. However, Cusack is always watchable and carries the movie well, more or less.
The plot is plonking obvious. A serial killer bumps off people, most of them wholly innocent victims, and each murder scene is clearly based on one of Poe's stories. The first one involves a girl stuffed up a chimney, for instance, and an apartment from which escape from the police was apparently impossible. A smart detective intuits that a hidden spring can open the apparently nailed-shut window. Now, how did he know that? Because he has read 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' of course!
While all this malarkey is unfolding, Poe is getting drunk, starting fights, being impoverished, arguing with newspaper editors, and trying to win over the father of his girlfriend Emily Hamilton (Alice Eve, doing her best). There are references to various real incidents throughout the film, including the Longfellow feud and Poe being chucked out of West Point. The cops turn up and question him, and thus he meets the tenacious (in a non-genius way) Inspector Fields (Luke Evans).
The next killing is 'The Pit and the Pendulum'. Here the movie goes bananas by having the victim turn out to be Rufus Giswold, Poe's literary executor in our timeline. Griswold was notoriously guilty of character assassination in Poe's obituary. In the movie, Poe knows that Griswold is one of his many enemies. In real life, however, he must have believed the feud was over to let the man take control of his literary legacy. Opium and booze really mess you up.
Anyway, it becomes clear the killer is setting Poe a challenge in the usual fashion. There are some nice red herrings and nods to the stories. There's a geographical puzzle that recalls 'The Gold Bug', for instance. But the film also irritates if you let it. A good example is that 'The Mystery of Marie Roget' was a fictionalised account of an American murder mystery, but here it is treated as wholly original. Better is 'The Cask of Amontillado', with the cops actually conducting a proper search of the catacombs.
The actual look of the film is pretty good. Grimyh and foggy Baltimore is almost monochrome much of the time, and splashes of colour are well-handled - especially red. But the characters act like modern people in funny clothes. At one point Emily simply turns up at Poe's lodgings alone at night. Did she get an Uber? Another gripe, perhaps impossible to avoid, is that the language is ahistorical, generic Hollywood speak with the occasional 'olde worlde' flourish that only makes it seem more artificial.
This becomes a major issue when the killer kidnaps Emily from her rich daddy's masked ball and sticks her in a premature burial situation. The only way Poe can save her is if he writes an imaginative account of her death and publishes it on the front page of a Baltimore newspaper. The extracts from the piece are the way someone with a mild concussion might imagine Poe wrote.
Anyway, we all know how it ends. Poe dies, and the cause of death is mysterious enough for the writers to make it suitably romantic and tragic. The genuine mystery of Poe's final words is neatly handled. Inspector Fields is allowed to actually do some detecting. I like to think he might have married Emily and become chief of police. Indeed, I wish this film had been about Fields, a more relatable and believable character than Poe, despite being completely fictional.
Ah, but is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?
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