L.A. Confidential

It ain't Chinatown, but it's a lean, mean, surprising film.

Directed by Curtis Hanson
A Warner Bros. Release

recommended

We've been told that L.A. Confidential has all the noir symmetry, sinewy corruption and swift-kick dialogue of Roman Polanski's epic Chinatown. Despite similar themes of romance caught in a net of corruption and influence (and soundtrack composer Jerry Goldsmith's theft of his own musical motifs), these films have little in common.

Chinatown was about physical and psychological growth and dependency, who would provide it, what it would cost, and the inner lives of the keepers of the cash. L.A. Confidential is also about growth: a burgeoning city of angels trying to keep increasing drug and crime infiltration at bay in the early '50s, and the growth of the star-studded subcity Hollywood, a town with its own set of laws. Butit's the connection between crime and whim that makes L.A. Confidential chug: drugs, prostitutes, police and the press all working to reinvent the wheel with a lot of graft and racism as the grease.

Using James Ellroy's book of the same name as Biblical text, writer Brian Helgeland and director/writer Curtis Hanson devise as lean a script and as non-noir a visual plan as humanly possible. To do this, they've sacrificed poetry to blunt cinematic grit, with surprisingly little gushing blood for a nouvelle-pulp flick. Moving around Ellroy's characters isn't easy — his people are almost psychotically motivated by a maze of circumstance — but Hanson's near-TV-movie direction, the sharp questioning script and Dante Spinotti's gently diffused cinematography work toward a bleak troubling centerpoint.

A slithering Sid Hutchins (Danny DeVito at his gleeful best) introduces our scenario. As crusty but friendly editor of the trs pulpy Hush-Hush tabloid, he is in the king seat, currying favor for the suppression or exchange of incriminating info, usually of the who-you-screw and what-you-smoke kind. A reciprocal relationship with cop/cop-TV advisor Jack Vincennes (a coolly flashy Kevin Spacey, who plays his epiphanies as magnetically as he does his cockiness) keeps the two men in an unholy but swinging alliance. Hey, Vincennes rocks — he "nabbed Bob Mitchum for reefer!"

The types of crimes these gentleman love to catch you in the middle of are often performed under the aegis of Fleur De Lis. The organization with the motto "anything you desire" is run by rich pimp/industrialist Pierce Patchett (a very oily David Strathairn). If he doesn't sell you pot or heroin, he can get you young flesh specially "cut" to look and fuck like your favorite movie star. If you don't like Rita Hayworth (a prostitute whose murder is central to the killing at The Nite Owl Diner), there's always Veronica Lake/Lynn Bracken, the whore with a heart of copper played by Kim Basinger. In this light, Hollywood's glimmering sheen is miles away, replaced here by acheap bulb in a fancy shade.

The cops are represented by hothead Bud White (Russell Crowe) — a guy with no qualms about beating a witness, but an aversion to anyone who hurts women — and Ed Exley (Guy Pierce), a quickly rising college-boy officer withno stomach for beating heads, the son of an infamous precinct godhead whose shadow he must live in and whose sense of justice he prays he lives up to. He's ambitious: he makes his way up the ladder by diming out fellow officers for beating Mexican prisoners. And, because he kills several possibly innocent black men for a murder at the Nite Owl (where White's partner died, the film's key incident), he's also self-loathing. The beaverlike Pierce gives us the desired shades of brash, greedy confidence and sorrowful empty heart all at once.

Each character unravels slowly, their values melting away as each set of circumstance eats away at them. Headbusting cops and clean-cut police unite out of shame rather than some gung-ho garrulousness. But even atonement is impossible — when scruples become suddenly important to somebody like Vincennes, there's no payoff.

By film's end all the whores get it in the back, the front or the side. Luckily for the audience, Hanson, the script and his fine cast (especially Spacey and Cromwell) keep you surprised as to which bastard gets it first.