Too Late (Dennis Hauck, 2015)

Too Late is a Neo Noir film directed by Dennis Hauck, released in 2015. The basic plot follows a detective through a broken timeline, searching for a girl from his past who needs his help. It contains all the classic tropes of a Film Noir: a morally questionable private eye, a seedy underworld, thugs, beautiful and dangerous women, a lost love from the past, and a highly stylized script full of borderline-cheesy one liners. Additionally, it was shot entirely on 35mm film. It was released to a slew of negative reviews, however, which is always the risk when dealing with noir. The age-old question remains - is noir a genre or a time period? Can Neo Noir capture the turmoil, distrust and darkness felt in the time of the war-torn 1940s - the heyday of Noir? Can it translate to our modern time without coming off as trite or too out of touch? I’d argue that Too Late takes a chance on itself as a good example of Neo Noir by acknowledging what made Noirs great in their glory days, and keeping the themes of film, time and memory at the forefront of the plot.

My overall opinion, then, is that I liked it. I like the self-referential nature & the stylized dialogue. I think calling attention to yourself is almost necessary in the case of Neo Noir, so as to acknowledge what every critic and film studies student seemingly already knows - that the film can never be a “true” Noir. The “neo” will always be there. Too Late opens with two low level drug dealers discussing the idea of characters in movies, revealing that they know they’re in a movie by having a copy of the film at the end to explain the previous mayhem of the plot. This breaking of the third wall excellently sets up the tone for the entire film. By reminding the audience from the outset that it's a film with characters that we are watching, that this is fiction, the viewer can relax and enjoy it for its surface value. We’re let into a private joke and yes, even the filmmakers know people don’t say things like “I’m gonna hang a collar on a guy” these days. We don’t have to take it as a serious attempt at recreating a classic Film Noir.

The girl we’re searching for with Mel, our private eye, is named Dorothy. I don’t think this can be counted as coincidence. We’re introduced to her backstory connection with Mel (the P.I.) as she’s stripping in a club. A sweet girl, lost in a world she doesn’t belong - a dark Oz. Yet another reference to classic film.

Even the title - Too Late - harkens to the fact that in today’s Hollywood, it is too late for a film like this. It’s out of place, disjointed. The amount of negative reviews (there are a lot) atone to this. If you take into account that Hauck knows it’s too late for a Film Noir but did it anyway, however, then I think that makes the film even stronger. How can you make an argument for it not standing the test of time when it tells you itself, before you even press play, that it doesn’t? It gives Too Late the non-conformist and anti-establishment attitude of its predecessors.

Near the end, Mel says to Jill, the femme fatale character, “You never know when something more exotic will fall into your lap.” To which Jill replies, “Jesus Christ, that was fucking terrible.” This could be taken as the filmmakers breaking the third wall again and letting us know that they know the dialogue all along is “terrible.” This is the kind of pastiche necessary to make a great Neo Noir, acknowledging the imitation of itself. The entire interaction between Mel and Jill is highly stylized and displaced for the time they’re supposed to be in (present day). Not to mention that it takes place in a drive-in movie theatre - a setting I’m willing to bet very few if the viewers are familiar with. A drive-in was also a popular spot in the 1950s, which brought about the “death” of Noir in film, another clever and not-so-subtle time reference from Hauck. There is one quick reminder during this exchange from Jill to pull us back to 2015 as she mentions she only sees an old friend through Skype. To him being terrible, Mel replies to give him a break; that he’s out of practice. If we’d been thinking the lines were terrible throughout the story, does that mean that we, the viewers, are also out of practice from watching and appreciating this kind of over stylized, hyper dramaticized film?

Am I reading too much into it? Maybe. But when a film opens by talking about films, you’d be silly not to hunt for Easter Eggs. So while others say that Too Late has no place in our time, that the dialogue is too overboard, that it just tries too hard, I say that’s the point. Hauck obviously knew the challenges, the history, the arguments from diehard Noir fans that would come from making a Neo Noir in 2015. He used all of these could-be negatives as amo, placing them blatantly out in the open, to make Too Late a smart and relevant testament to film history. Mel and Dorothy sum it up best. Mel asks her, “why start now?” And Dorothy replies, “That’s a silly question — because it’s now everytime we do something, so if everybody always asked that question, then nobody would ever do anything. It would always be too late.”