Noir is a genre defined less by archetypes as it is by tone and story. A detective in a trench coat doesn’t qualify a film as noir any more than a joke in a film qualifying it as a drama. The archetypes are often set dressing for a denser, more existential anguish that true noir tends to feature.
Noir is a spiral. Noir is a character stumbling upon something vast and sinister and having every chance to turn their eyes from it, to go back to life as they knew it before, to pretend everything is okay once more. And noir is their refusal to do so, due either to stubbornness or stupidity. Noir is a character grasping for answers, oblivious to the fact that they don’t really want those answers.
As such, most noirs skew grim. Today, I want to talk about the rare one that doesn’t, one of my favorite movies of the decade and a criminally underrated modern classic: The Nice Guys. The third directorial effort by auteur Shane Black after Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and the best MCU movie (Iron Man 3, fight me), it takes place in 1970s Los Angeles and focuses on two men, one a private eye named Holland March (Ryan Gosling, mustached) and Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe, the best he’s ever been) who is professionally violent. They find themselves entwined in the same case regarding a missing girl and through their efforts to track her down uncover a vast criminal conspiracy.
Photo Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
Black’s two non-Marvel efforts are interesting instances of films that operate within the genre of noir, but without much of its tone. These films play more like comedies than anything else, with quippy, sardonic dialogue and physical comedy all cranked up to about eleven throughout. As such, it’s difficult to immediately recognize either as noir, especially The Nice Guys, which additionally takes place almost entirely in daylight (noir settings are often covered in shadow, be it of night or the artificial sort).
Still, the journey March and Healy go on together throughout the film is fundamentally noir. When we meet them, their goals are diametrically opposed – March has been hired to find an old woman’s granddaughter and is following a lead named Amelia. Healy has been paid to rough March up and tell him to stop looking for Amelia. They soon realize that their cases are intertwined and begin working together in an effort to figure out just what the hell is going on.
Photo Credit: Daniel McFadden / Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc
What they find is a sprawling conspiracy that goes all the way to the top of the Detroit auto industry. I won’t spoil every detail – they’re worth discovering for yourself – but by the end of their journey, they’re confronted by the fact that their victory is small and personal. The bad guys? They’re still going to win. As one of the villains tells them, “Detroit always wins.”
I think that’s what cements the film as a classic noir in my mind. Even though the good guys technically win (which noir protagonists rarely do), they still lose. This film, ostensibly a light buddy-cop comedy of sorts, ends with the characters realizing that their efforts have meant little to nothing, that they’ve simply put duct tape over a single hole in a quickly sinking ship. Every step they took towards this point was met with an opportunity to give up, to turn away, and while it’s admirable that they didn’t, the fact they soldiered on means so very little in the grand scheme of things.
Photo Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
So why does the film end with the two of them celebrating over victory drinks? Because while The Nice Guys is a noir film, it’s not just a noir film. It’s also a profoundly sad story about two broken men who, through the friendship formed while solving this case, rediscover the will to live. Healy is a sad sack when we meet him and March is actively suicidal. One of the film’s great gags involves him accidentally slicing his wrist breaking through a glass window and the hospital trip that follows in which everyone assumes he’s tried to kill himself. The key to the joke is that it’s entirely plausible that he would.
That’s the victory in The Nice Guys – the conclusion of noir often leaves its protagonists fundamentally shaken, if not dead. Think about the ending of the all-time classic Chinatown. Jake may not be in jail for a crime he didn’t commit or dead, but he’s broken after the events of the film, having glimpsed a nihilistic evil he never should have seen. March and Healy are faced with the same realization – that there are forces beyond their control and that their efforts to do some good have ultimately meant nothing.
But, they still made it. They still solved the case and brought some semblance of closure to a couple of sad people. They’re still alive – and each of them now has a reason to wake up in the morning. Sometimes that’s all that counts.
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