Scoop's notes in yellow

Watching The Last Tattoo is one of the most disappointing and frustrating movie-going experiences I have had in the past year.

When the legendary Howard Hawks was directing The Big Sleep, he became very confused about several points in the labyrinthine plot. He figured out most of the important points to his own satisfaction, but was totally stumped about the identity of the person who killed the family chauffeur, Owen Taylor. His screenwriter, the even more legendary William Faulkner, was certainly no stranger to anfractuosity, but could make no more sense of it than Hawks could. The frustrated director finally got desperate enough to wire Raymond Chandler, the author of the novel upon which the film was based. Chandler thought about it, consulted his notes, thought about it some more, and cabled Hawks back to say he had no goddamned idea.

Well, the Last Tattoo is so complicated it makes The Big Sleep seem like an Adam Sandler movie.

Not that it's a bad movie. It's pretty good in some ways, and I think the explanations all make sense to me in a hazy way, but there are so many characters and relationships that keeping track of them requires one of those flow charts that college debaters use. That fact alone was not what bothered me. The real structural problem with the film is that it builds and builds for 100 minutes, spinning its complex web, and then the whole plot is suddenly explained in a long monologue delivered by a character who seems to have figured it all out. Two problems. First problem: I didn't really keep a flow chart, so she explained it too fast for me to keep up with all of it. It was just a flurry of names, mostly minor characters. I'd be thinking, "Now who was that again?", but by the time I figured it out, if ever, she was two plot points down the road.  Second problem: I still didn't "get it" all when the film ended. The hero, who was framed for a crime he did not commit, was set free to go back to the war, but various bad guys remained unpunished, I wasn't sure whether one main character was innocent, and at least one guy was dead for reasons totally unclear to me, at the hands of a character unfamiliar to me.

And I still don't know who killed family chauffeur Owen Taylor.

I was watching The Last Tattoo with Elya, and we both shouted at the TV, "That's it? That's the ending? Maybe there's more." Nope. The credits were rollin'. The sad thing about that is we both kind of liked it while it was developing, and we stopped a film a couple of points to discuss points of interest. It has two very strong positives:

• The background is fascinating. There's the tension between New Zealand and the USA in the Pacific theater. There's the tension between the various American officers - some warriors, some merely political animals. There is a lot of unfamiliar and interesting material there, and the film was actually lensed in New Zealand.
• The noir premise is original. An American soldier is killed in New Zealand. He is about to be married to a Kiwi prostitute with a rare strain of venereal disease. The American military investigates the murder. The Kiwi health authorities investigate the V.D. Their lines of authority cross and conflict, but the investigators finally co-operate, and  ... well, one of them is a man, and the other a woman, and ...

One last point. Do you remember those reading interpretation questions on the SATs where the item begins with a literary citation and then quizzes the student with something like, "The best name for this paragraph would be ..."? Here's a hint. If somebody ever recites you the plot of this movie and then asks you the best name for it, the right answer is NOT going to be The Last Tattoo. That title has some vague connection to the plot, so it will be one of the weak choices put in there to distract you.