Review: L.A. Confidential By: C. Michael Bailey
Starring: Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, James Cromwell, David Strathairn, Kim Basinger, Danny DeVito. Directed by: Curtis Hanson Screenplay by: Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson Warner Brothers 1997 130 minutes
I read James Ellroy's White Jazz first. It was hard to read, the language and rhythm was fast, improvised, and unpredictable. Several years later I read L.A. Confidential in anticipation of Curtis Hanson's (The River Wild, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle) movie of the same name. I found the book much easier to read because of White Jazz. Ellroy used the same techniques he used in White Jazz: Short, fast chapters devoted to stream of conscience, police logs, and Los Angeles newspaper and tabloid articles. The fictional rag Hush, Hush, with its funky, hip 50s tabloidese appears in both books. It is with this urban patois that Danny DeVito's Hush, Hush editor Sid Hudgens introduces the film by narrating his next by-line as he pecks it out to the, "Accentuate the Positive." Indeed, one of the cooler movie intros of recent memory.
Briefly (as there have been several fine synopses published previously on this newsgroup by Walter Frith, Timothy Scott, Travis Daub, James Berardinelli, and Michael Dequina) L.A. Confidential is a story focusing primarily on three Los Angles detectives in the early 1950s. These vastly different men are the bookish and ambitious Edmund Exley (Guy Pearce), the brutish Wendell "Bud" White (Russell Crowe, previously in Virtuosity), and the cavalier Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey). These three odd acquaintances are brought together to investigate a mass murder in an urban coffee shop called The Night Owl. Into this main plot fabric is woven several competing subplots that illuminates the true genius of this film-- its screen writing.
James Ellroy's book was accurately described as "sprawling" by Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. It is a very complex and involved book that would be difficult (if not impossible) to adapt for the screen with anything approaching perfect fidelity. Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson do a admirable job with this adaptation, compressing the book's less than neat story lines into a tellable tale without sugarcoating it. Of note is their treatment of the two main characters, Exley and White, as diametrically opposed and essential to one another as a one glove is to the other.
The book portrays Exley as an educated, ambitious, and duplicitous fledgling police officer who wants to present the appearance of being a straight arrow while manipulating his way politically up the ladder. In the book he presents with a moral opacity not easily understood. Exley's persona in the movie tends more to the straight arrow, who while still ruthless, is not as ruthless as in the book. Where Exley has a moral opacity, his counterpart Wendell White is portrayed in the book as not having the intellect to act any other way than violently. White has no hidden agenda; what you see is what you get. He is everything that Exley is not (and vice versa). In the film together they form a perfect whole. Helgeland and Hanson expertly take the images of Exley and White from the book and with their screenplay focus their blurry print personas into ones made for the cinema, and readily digestible by the viewing public, who typically do not care for gray areas.
Happily, Kevin Spacey's Vincennes needed little fine tuning in his translation from the book to the film. Hanson captures his cheerfully amoral character perfectly on film.
Hanson adds some nice period touches to Ellroy's already encyclopedic treatment of 1950's Hollywood with nuggets like the Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker pianoless quartet playing a party and the insinuation of fiction in fact by having had Jack Vincennes' be the cop who arrested actor Robert Mitchum for his well publicized marijuana possession.
Aussies Pearce and Crowe speak perfectly accentless Californian without a whiff of down under twang, no small feat (remember Kevin Costner's anemic English Accent in Robinhood?) and are really the stars of the show, overpowering Kevin Spacey's truly superb performance as the Hollywood social animal Vincennes. Danny DeVito is delightfully well cast as the Hush, Hush editor, as James Cromwell is as police captain Dudley Smith. The only possible disappointment is a poorly cultivated Lynn Bracken (White's Love interest) played by a stunning Kim Basinger.
L.A. Confidential is a fine film by any standard. It is American noir without being too noir. It has a sensibility that does not cater to today's delusional nostalgia for the 1950s. I think it has been presumptive of other critics to compare this film to Chinatown, The Two Jakes (two masterpieces), or Mulholland Falls (a hack Chinatown wannabe). This film cannot be evaluated based on these earlier films. It has no peer in this genre of films that have been released in the past several years. A fine film and a fine book. Treat yourself to both.
-- C. Michael Bailey cmbailey@aristotle.net
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