Hush, Hush, Sweet City
Stop
reading .
Put this review on hold until after you've seen L.A. Confidential . No,
wait. Stick around until the end of this paragraph. It's not that I'm planning
to give away plot twists--as in, "She has a penis!" It's simply that I don't
want to orient you. I want you to see the film as I did, with no expectations
and no idea who's the hero, who's the villain, or even what's at stake. L.A.
Confidential is that rare mainstream cop thriller that refuses to telegraph
its outcome in the first 15 minutes or, for much of its running time, to tell
you how to feel about its protagonists. So log off, see the movie, and come
back.
Are you
back? My hunch is that Curtis Hanson, once a craftily offbeat writer-director
who found the beat in a big way and made those thumpingly predictable
blockbusters The Hand That Rocks the
Cradle (1992) and The
River Wild (1994), consciously set out to liberate himself from Hollywood
hackery. He discovered the perfect project in James Ellroy's punchy,
labyrinthine crime novel, one of the few from the last decade that doesn't feel
as if it was written expressly to be filmed. The story isn't entirely fresh.
It's the old load of subterranean conspiracies and climactic rat-a-tat--with a
new, post-Rodney King acknowledgment that white cops who rough up minority
suspects are the rule, not the exception. But Hanson's way of telling the story
catches you off-guard. He makes the familiar unfamiliar.
In part, he does it with casting: Of the triptych of
leading men, not one is traditional movie-hero material. The closest to a
"name" of the three is Kevin Spacey as Jack Vincennes, also known as "Hollywood
Jack." Vincennes works Narcotics and also serves as technical adviser for a
Dragnet -like TV show called Badge of Honor . He isn't a monster,
but he has almost no scruples; he's an unabashed fame whore.
Jack
routinely pockets cash from Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito), the film's occasional
narrator, a reporter for Hush-Hush magazine and a fiendish imp out of
Frank Gifford's nightmares: Hudgens sets up public figures with drugs or
prostitutes, then calls in Vincennes to make the bust and pose for pictures.
Spacey is disconcertingly breezy. The actor has been chewing the scenery for so
long--brilliantly--that I wasn't sure he had this kind of jaunty star turn in
him. Better yet, he brings off the burgeoning of Jack's conscience with
exceptional subtlety, beginning with the man's embarrassment at shaking hands
at a party with a dupe he once collared and ending with his horror at a slaying
he has inadvertently abetted. Still, he's too opaque to serve as a moral
center, and besides, I haven't forgiven him yet for decapitating Gwyneth
Paltrow in Seven .
The other two leads, Russell Crowe and Guy
Pearce, are even tougher to get a handle on, although both actors (both
Australian, which you'd never guess) will be overnight stars. As Detective Bud
White, Crowe is a beefy thug with a compulsion to rough up wife-beaters. Oddly
tender, he nonetheless takes his Galahad act to the point of psychosis, dashing
off with gun cocked the instant he hears of a damsel in distress. He doesn't
think twice about blasting a crater in an ostensibly guilty suspect, planting a
weapon on the man, and claiming self-defense.
White's
nemesis, Ed Exley (Pearce), is everything we admire in a cop--in theory. He
takes no bribes, vows never to plant evidence or to shoot hardened criminals
instead of arresting them, and single-handedly dynamites the "blue wall of
silence" when police are caught beating the hell out of a group of Latino
suspects. But Pearce makes Exley a stuck-up, repressed little prig who issues
orders wearing an all-purpose smirk on his rigidly chiseled face. Worse, his
snooty righteousness is tinged with opportunism: He's willing to make deals
with superiors in return for promotions.
The plot--which turns on the arrest of a mobster kingpin
(Paul Guilfoyle), a massacre at a diner, and a group of call girls surgically
altered to resemble movie stars--is almost too diffuse to synopsize. Much of
the fun comes from finally learning which piece fits where.
Lacking heroes, villains, and
a moral compass, the first two-thirds of the film leaves you adrift, which
means that Hanson and his co-writer, Brian Helgeland ( Conspiracy Theory )
have to absorb you with the force of their storytelling. The film opens with
DeVito delivering a sardonic ode to L.A. that captures both the gleaming
surface and the underlying rancidity. As filmed by Dante Spinotti, L.A.
Confidential conjures up those racy old Avon or Pocket Books pulp
covers--film noir but with colors that are lurid and deep--and comments on
them, too. The detectives pose for flashbulb pictures beside handcuffed
suspects or scenes of carnage, their hats rakishly tilted. In this L.A., men
and women dreaming of fame arrive on the bus to be instantly victimized by the
ones who got there first.
Perhaps White's relationship
with Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger), a prostitute who's dyed and coifed to
resemble Veronica Lake, is a tad moist, but the actors' physical rapport is
sensational. You can believe that White would open himself up to this
bedraggled blond princess, admitting, "I'm just the guy they bring in to scare
the other guys." And Basinger, a cool customer, has never looked more
comfortable with another actor, not even Alec Baldwin. As her millionaire pimp,
an operator called Pierce Patchett, David Strathairn does a classic
detective-movie turn: sleek, unruffled, every motion cagily deliberate. The man
has purged himself of all surface emotion.
Hanson co-wrote the
underrated White Dog (1982) with Sam Fuller, and there's a touch of
Fuller in this film's lugubrious trashiness. At two-and-a-quarter hours, the
picture is too long, and not exactly winged. But just when you start to get
impatient with the plodding, one-thing-after-another style of narration,
there's a shocker that blows you into the movie's last act, and then a scene in
which a couple of former antagonists figure out what stinks and join forces in
an abandoned motel to stave off an army of bad guys. It's a virtuoso shootout,
a riot of angles--the villains depicted in whispers, scudding shadows, flashes
of body parts. Bullets explode in shards of glass and light, bringing death in
chiaroscuro. And L.A. Confidential , with its divergent plot strands,
rockets to cop-movie heaven.
Cop fight: Bud White
(Crowe) and Ed Exley (Pearce) almost mix it up (59 seconds) :
