For our Saturday movie date this week, we're marking the twentieth anniversary of LA Confidential, which opened in September 1997, with a belated tip of the hat to its director, Curtis Hanson, who died last year sooner than he should have. You expect feature films to have problems with Jane Austen or Henry James, but what's depressing in recent times is the way they seem to have difficulty even managing their own relatively straightforward genres. By way of example, a week or two before LA Confidential was released, a thriller opened in which barely anything made sense: Mel Gibson's Conspiracy Theory started off perfectly fine with a paranoid cabbie, suddenly lurched into Manchurian Candidate territory, and wound up with one of those villains who has innumerable opportunities to kill Mel but never does because he prefers toying with him - which only movie baddies do. Like so many films, it's a compilation album of bits which work fine in other pictures.
So it came as something of a surprise to find Brian Helgeland, who wrote Conspiracy Theory, doing such a fine job twenty minutes later with LA Confidential, adapted from a then very recent source, James Ellroy's dense hallucinatory crime novel of the early Fifties - and directed by Curtis Hanson, who'd spent the Nineties doing amiable formula stuff like The Hand that Rocks the Cradle. You miss Ellroy's chopped-up pseudo-bop voice for about 40 seconds, but there's Johnny Mercer singing "Ac-cent-tchu-ate The Positive" over the opening titles, which is a droll choice. In great thrillers - Double Indemnity, say - Los Angeles itself and its particular social cartography are a kind of character in the plot, which is why Michael Winner's decision to relocate The Big Sleep to Surrey didn't work out for him. When the title's LA Confidential, you need a sense of place even more, and Hanson delivers, from the grubby glamour of Dante Spinotti's cinematography to the voluptuous menace in Jerry Goldsmith's fine score, in which even the arrival of literal rodents is accompanied by the string section.
It's Christmas Eve in the City of Angels: Dino's on the hi-fi, a husband batters his wife under the Yuletide lights, and down at the precinct the LAPD does much the same to a bunch of hapless Mexicans. Some of the dramatis personae here are real: Mickey Cohen, the boxer turned mobster whose incarceration prompts a run of gangland slayings by would-be successors; Johnny Stompanato, the thug with the classy dame who wound up starring in the city's starriest (pre-OJ) murder trial. James Ellroy knows this world well: his dad was Rita Hayworth's accountant, and his mom's murder has been unsolved for six decades. But most of the characters are his own, especially the three cops: Bud White, a thick-set, seething street tough; Edward Exley, a bespectacled pencil-necked rookie despised by his comrades; and Jack Vincennes, a morally relaxed dandy who serves as paid adviser to a "Dragnet" knock-off on TV by day and plays LA's celebrity crime-stopper by night.
The film introduces almost all its characters as types - a suggestion here, a gesture there, and we assume, having seen so many cop thrillers, that we know them already. At which point, ever so unobtrusively, they begin to trade places. Just as the film blends real events with fiction, so its cast mixes familiar Hollywood faces with complete unknowns. For a Hollywood production set in Hollywood's back yard, Hanson went to the furthest reaches of the British Commonwealth for half his principals: the Antipodeans Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce play White and Exley, respectively; James Cromwell, last seen as Babe's farmer, is the weather-beaten police captain, Dudley Smith. Hot off The Usual Suspects, the enigmatic Kevin Spacey plays Vincennes, hovering suavely on the brink between self-satisfaction and self- loathing. "Why'd you become a cop?" asks Exley.
Vincennes pauses, gazes across the room and says blankly, "I don't remember." As often with Spacey, you're not quite sure what's going through him at that moment, even as the plot conspires to give him a chance to remember.
Danny DeVito is a sleazeball gossip peddler, Kim Basinger is a novelty whore, and perhaps the most pleasurable aspect of the entire movie is that billing is irrelevant: in contrast to the usual so-called "ensemble" pictures in which the cast are picked off in order of increasing check size, it's startling to be confronted by a film that stacks up a Hamlet-scale body count while disdaining the conventions: You have no way of knowing who'll make it to the end. If there's a character who embodies (so to speak) the film it's the one who could so easily have brought the whole edifice crashing down. Kim Basinger plays Lynn Bracken, the aspiring actress who caught the bus to Hollywood and wound up a hooker. "It's still acting," she points out, which is true enough and a point that the typical bored dead-eyed trollop might bear in mind. But it's especially so in Lynn's case: She works for the Fleur de Lys, which specializes in girls who've been "cut" (as in plastic surgery) and coiffed to look like your favorite movie stars. Lynn is the lookalike for Veronica Lake, the in-house Veronica Lakealike.
Of course, she doesn't look like Veronica Lake so much as a sad, shop-worn Kim Basinger. But Basinger is terrific as a hard-edged, half-defeated romantic fantasist. As yet another man crosses her threshold, the turntable plays Gershwin - "They're writing songs of love/But Not For Me" - and somehow what should be an overly crass statement of the obvious instead hints at other outcomes. Basinger as Bracken as Lake gets to the heart of LA Confidential, a meditation of the burrows of deceit that hollow out Los Angeles. In a company town where the industry is the production of make-believe, why wouldn't that seep out from the factory to infect reality? The film doesn't answer that philosophical conundrum, but, in one of several ingenious diversions along the way, it does use it as the basis for an excellent Lana Turner joke.
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It's amazing how Mark - and the commenters - are able to discuss the plot without saying "spoiler alert." One of the most unexpected plot twists I've ever seen. If you haven't seen this film, do not die before doing so. Great entertainment.
-Those involved in the creation of L.A. Confidential deserve special kudos for taking a damn fine, but very complicated book and turning into a feature-length film. James Ellroy's books really cry-out for the mini-series treatment, so this crew pulled-off the nearly impossible.
-It should be noted for the record that the late, great Jack Webb was nothing like Jack Vincennes.
Twenty years ago I was working for a small alarm company in Costa Mesa, CA. The owner would sometimes take a salesman to lunch when he was looking for something to do. He was about 79 years old at the time and he would reminisce about his time working at LAPD, and particularly his tenure in the intelligence department. Two things stand out in my memory of those stories - a description of the fun he and his partner had doing their job..."We were kings!"...and a rather involved account of how he and his partner - who later became an LA Superior Court judge - were tasked with assassinating Mickey Cohen. They worked six months on getting it done and just when they were going to pull the trigger, so to speak, they were pulled off. I was dubious to say the least, but when we got back to the office, he showed me a beautiful color magazine/book about "LA Confidential - the Movie" with the simple comment - "That was my life". The next day he brought me a xerox of an LA Times clipping with photo of him, his partner and Mickey Cohen as they were bringing him in on the charge of "cursing at a woman in public". Jerry Wooters, his compadres of the era would say"had the balls of a lion". I wish I would have paid better attention.
PS: What IS it about Los Angeles? Admittedly my first hand knowledge of the city is limited to a very short business trip 20 years ago. But according to The Movies, the city -- The Movies' own city -- was doomed and cursed from the start. There's no other city I can think of that has that apparently factory installed atmosphere of corruption and pending doom. As if, in a reversal of the natural order of things, its been _rotting_ rather than growing since it's birth, but in VERY slow motion, and throwing off deceptively pretty sparks while it does so.
When I recommend this movie, I'm sure to advise: "Listen to EVERY single line of dialogue, no matter how seemingly trivial; you'll thank me later..."
Always loved the names, Ed Exely, Bud White, etc etc.
I had forgotten that Hollywood once made entertaining action movies that didn't require costume clad superheroes...
This movie has long been one of my favorites. I thought the big 3 were all terrific - well written, cast, and acted - and loved the way the three wove through each others' work and personal lives. Hearing the name Rolo Tomasi will always make me smile, just so clever. And James Cromwell was just superb: "Hush, hush..."
This movie is like Shawshank Redemption and a few others: if I stumble across it while flipping channels, I usually finish watching it. That's one of the highest compliments I can think of after seeing a movie.
Well put, George. This film's in the "Shawshank category" for me too. The script is great; obviously it had plenty to work with, but trimming it, constructing a new ending, etc., had to have taken a lot of labor. The Australia-steeped casting is spot on -- never mind Guy Pearce doing his thing (this and Memento are my favorites of his), or Cromwell playing brilliantly against type (he has the worst politics of any actor here; sometimes I like to think he's just acting). But Russell Crowe just owns Bud White. Not since Mel Gibson's Riggs have I seen an Aussie actor connect so well with American audiences playing a Yankee cop. By the end of the film, all Crowe had to do was smile at that D.A. -- not saying a word, just letting him talk -- and all around me in the theater, I could feel the audience just cringing at what was surely coming next. And unlike Gibson, Crowe didn't have a trio of imported Australian hits (Gallipoli, The Road Warrior, The Year of Living Dangerously) to preload his U.S. fan base. Without this film, Gladiator doesn't happen.
But the old-school filmic storytelling, almost a lost art nowadays, is what sets <>>L.A. Confidential apart. Certainly director Curtis Hanson never did a better job. Somehow, in a remarkably complicated film with dozens of period characters and settings, Hanson makes sure the audience is never confused for long. For my money, "Rollo Tomasi" is right up there with "Keyser Söze" in terms of a possibly nonexistent person nonetheless driving the plot forward. A classic that still holds up today.
What I like about this film is the role models. What does it mean to man up and face the consequences? Flawed men rise to the occasion to be heroic. There are no medicated metrosexuals in sight.
An excellent observation, well said, Ken.
Actually, there is that one character, the unctuous District Attorney Loew, who fits the metrosexual bill. He even grooms himself in the mirror.
But, not coincidentally, he ends up soiling himself as White dangles him out of his own office window in an entertaining "good cop/bad cop" routine.