8.
L.A. Confidential (1997)
I saw L.A. Confidential in my home town theatre when I was maybe seventeen. I wasn’t that versed in noir at that point, I had seen a few of the obvious – Chinatown, Double Indemnity, Touch of Evil – but hadn’t gotten into the nitty-gritty yet, and I’m really still doing that now. I remember seeing it with my older younger brother, and both of us loving it, particularly the juicy/literate tough guy patter, the performances of Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Danny DeVito, Kevin Spacey, Kim Basinger, James Cromwell (everyone really, even future TV-pretty boy Simon Baker makes an impression in a brief bit), and the well-staged, occasionally startling bursts of gunplay. I’ve revisited L.A. Confidential several times throughout the years but it had been awhile, and I wanted to see if my few years of writing and more serially watching movies had changed my view of it. The answer is: a bit.
Co-writer (with Brian Helgeland)/ director Curtis Hanson has always been a clever maker of B-movies such as The Bedroom Window, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and The River Wild; he’s sturdy, professional, unpretentious, and his pictures are well-paced and well-staged. The relief of a Curtis Hanson movie is the knowledge that the filmmaker knows what he’s making and, while he isn’t condescending, he isn’t laboring to pump his genre pictures with pregnant, half-assed meanings (anything Bryan Singer has made since The Usual Suspects, for example; The Dark Knight, for another). But professionalism has its price, and that price is personality. You watch L.A. Confidential, and wonder how someone could make a movie out of Ellroy this cut-and-dry. L.A. Confidential is a mystery without any mystery, and the characters, who’re supposed to be trapped and resentful and tormented, are pretty obvious types, marching dutifully to the third act finish-line, which is, in this case, the biggest insult of the picture.
I never liked the happy ending, which has investigators Ed Exley (Pearce) and Bud White (Crowe), saving the day from a corrupt administrator (Cromwell) who is using his position to take over the criminal empire that has been scattered after its Big Kingpin’s imprisonment. One sees Cromwell coming a mile away, because a. you know his “dirty side of the law” speeches to Exley have to have a pay-off, and b. because there isn’t really anyone else to be the bad guy. The reveal of Cromwell’s true loyalties is a show-stopper though (and still shocking), and the business with “Rollo Tomasi” has a wonderful dime-store pulp irony – it could have come from a particularly shrewd 1940s thriller.
But the problem is that the kind of material Hanson is playing with here isn’t meant to be so straight-forward, even in the times when the good guy did ostensibly win (the underrated Hanson picture In Her Shoes is the kind of usually soft/sentimental material that benefits from his clarity). Noir (which L.A. Confidential isn’t, exactly) traffics in the horror movie idea that we are all guilty, that we’re waiting for the thing that reveals us to be the animals that we’re barely disguising. Noirs have blurry, intangible evil at their sidelines that might leave a little residue. I have voiced a number of doubts with Nolan’s Dark Knight over the last few years, and the picture is wildly undisciplined and over-explicit, but those are the trade-offs of obsession. Nolan isn’t a clean, nice, considerate professional. He aims all over the place, and while the results can be maddening, certain things stick. Dark Knight isn’t, technically, as “good” a movie as L.A. Confidential (and, I still prefer L.A. Confidential) but it comes closer to the spirit of noir and of Ellroy: which is that, the more you find out, the more you know you don’t know. Gotham has this hidden rot that stays with you; Hanson’s 1950s L.A., which is ripe for those implications, doesn’t. You truly feel at the end of L.A. Confidential that all of the bad guys are dead. (Though there are individual moments that reach their full potential, such as Exley’s manipulation of a group of black kidnapers, or Spacey’s flirtation with a groupie at a sound stage.)
That said, if L.A. Confidential is, ultimately, a polished studio product, then it is the way to have your polished studio products. The script still snaps; the pace is a model of one-incident-propelling-another storytelling; the performances are all essentially perfect, both individually and collectively (as a coherent ensemble); the shootouts are crackerjack; and the 1950s L.A. setting (courtesy of, among others, ace cinematographer Dante Spinotti) is the surreal movie factory of our dreams. One would be tempted to wish that Hanson had Nolan’s obsessive drive; or that Nolan had Hanson’s common sense and basic filmmaking coherence, but those qualities seem to be rare in the same person – one has to take an interesting director for the good and the bad.
