L.A. CONFIDENTIAL A
USA (140 mi) 1997
‘Scope d: Curtis Hanson
Palm trees in
silhouette against a cherry sky. City
lights twinkle. Los Angeles. A place where anything is possible. A place where dreams come true.
In the manner of CHINATOWN (1974), perhaps the ultimate Los
Angeles movie, or Robert Altman’s revisionist The
Long Goodbye (1973), both tell their stories through anti-heroes, working
class stiffs whose eyes are unwillingly opened, where the sordid history of Los
Angeles is used as a backdrop. This is
another contemporary crime thriller that walks us through the prism of 1940’s
film noir classics, as we’re once again investigating the dark underbelly of
the city of Angels, an angst-ridden urban world of crooks and detectives
fighting over the spoils of criminality, where mob gang turfs run the drug
trade, but all that’s up for grabs when they arrest Mickey Cohen on tax evasion
charges, exactly like they did Al Capone, where there is a sudden void in who
takes over the lucrative business. With
mob figures continually getting axed, the public is led to believe there is a
gang war taking place with various factions vying for power. But that’s only part of the cover up. In a mass exposé of the corruption within the
Los Angeles police department, this film peels back the veneer of
respectability, where the public image is one of professionalism, generated by
Jack Webb as Sergeant Joe Friday in Dragnet
(1951 – 59), one of the most popular police shows in American culture, where
not only is the infamous theme song recognizable, but so is the opening
narration, “The story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect
the innocent.” With this reverence for
crime stories ripped from the headlines, or coming directly out of the police
blotter, people often mistake this cleaned-up, heavily sanitized version of
police work as the real thing. This film
proves otherwise. With absolutely
brilliant performances by two unknown-at-the-time Australian actors playing LA
cops, Guy Pearce is Edmund Exley, the zealously ambitious, overly self-righteous,
yet intellectually repressed, thinking man’s cop, a kid following in his
father’s footsteps, with a penchant for making headlines, always seeking
accolades and glory, and what turns out to be not only the best performance of
the year, but arguably his entire career (both performances were overlooked by
the Academy), Russell Crowe plays Wendell “Bud” White, the brute with the heart
of gold, a thuggish cop with a take-no-prisoners attitude whose bare knuckles
prowess gets the better of every man in a physical confrontation, yet has a
sweet spot for protecting vulnerable women victimized by domestic assaults, an
inherent trait that endears him to the audience, making him the good guy even
when he acts like the bad guy.
Securing 9 Academy Award nominations, but winning only two
awards, one by Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson for Best Adapted Screenplay,
the other by Kim Basinger for Best Supporting Actress, as the film was routed on
Oscar night by James Cameron’s TITANIC (1997), winning eleven Academy Awards,
tying with BEN HUR (1959) for the most in Academy history, another period film,
becoming so exaggerated and over-inflated in the public’s mind, easily one of
the most rewarded yet least deserving films of all time, one with little
darkness and even less moral ambiguity.
This is instead one of the better films about men and the underlying
layers of repression, including repressed homosexuality, and how these male
testosterone hormones are then unleashed, uncontrolled, onto the unsuspecting
public in the form of police brutality, exposing cops who are so macho that
they have to beat people to display their masculinity. There’s a lot of sick puppies on display
here, disguised by their slick and smooth images put out by “Badge of Honor,” a
Dragnet-like TV version of LA cops
represented so effectively here by Kevin Spacey as Detective Sergeant Jack
Vincennes (modeled after Dean Martin, the epitome of cool), a Narco officer
providing technical advisement on the show, suggesting that the LA world of
cops is a giant, twisted, sordid world of cover-ups, where the head honcho is
Fascist Police Captain Dudley Smith, James Cromwell, so silky smooth and so
evil that you’d think he’s an alien about to remove his rubber mask. Danny DeVito is Sid Hudgens, the de facto
opening narrator, a dirt bag scum bucket who thrives on setting up celebrity victims,
receiving tips from Vincennes, rewarding him with payola and the money shot
arrest photo, digging out all the exploitive dirt for his Hush Hush sleaze-rag tabloid, with Kim Basinger as Lynn Bracken,
the high-priced Veronica Lake look-alike call girl, while behind the scenes
David Strathairn as Pierce Padgett runs the exclusive Fleur-de-Lis call girl
market that rakes in the dough, living in one of those designer homes of
opulence and luxury, with ex-cops serving as his personal bodyguard, where his
wealth allows him to ambitiously aspire for more, building freeways that will
make him even more millions. All of these
highly developed characters (80 speaking roles) are on display with terrific ensemble
acting performances cast in a swirl of atmosphere and intrigue in this 1953
fast-paced Hollywood thriller, a terrific screen adaptation written by Hanson
and Helgeland from James Ellroy’s 1990 police novel, condensing eight featured
characters in the book, each with and their own storylines, down to three, a
trio of all-star cops mired in a labyrinth of graft and corruption in this
sunshine version of film noir, where all that’s promised in this sunny Southern
California landscape is revealed to be an unadulterated pack of lies. In an introductory opening montage of picture
post card idealizations, we hear the sly sarcasm from Sid Hudgens, like a
barker at a carnival show, where one can expect to get thoroughly fleeced,
giddily counting his money while luring us into a rabbit hole of delusions. Behind these glossy images of paradise and
palm trees, there are secrets hidden behind every palm tree.
Come to Los Angeles! The sun shines bright, the beaches are wide
and inviting, and the orange groves stretch as far as the eye can see. There are jobs aplenty, and land is
cheap. Every working man can have his
own house, and inside every house, a happy, all-American family. You can have all this, and who knows... you
could even be discovered, become a movie star... or at least see one. Life is good in Los Angeles... it’s paradise
on Earth. Ha ha ha ha. That’s what they tell you, anyway.
Beneath the glitz and glamor, the film introduces us to
various players within the Los Angeles Police Department, where whatever noble
intentions may have led them to join the force has long since faded, as
somewhere along the line their career paths crisscrossed with a cesspool of crooked
cops and organized crime, where it was no longer about commendable service,
just survivors, as the daily grind separates the weak from the strong, where
you quickly learn not to rock the boat. Initially
we witness the sheer brutality of Officer Bud White, seen early on sitting in
his police car witnessing an explosive scene of domestic violence visibly
occurring in plain view through someone’s front window, a modest home with
lit-up Christmas decorations placed atop the roof. In one fell swoop, White pulls down the
decorations in a crash, creating an outdoor diversion before pulverizing the
man, who blindly walks outdoors completely stunned, wondering what the hell’s
going on, placed under arrest as White makes sure the woman has a safe place to
go. Next stop, the liquor store, as
White and his partner are picking up the booze for an office party, where he
coincidentally runs into Lynn Bracken making a similar run, with Padgett
sitting in the car with another woman wearing facial bandages. Asking if she’s all right, Bracken tells him
it’s not what he thinks, as she’s recovering from plastic surgery, but it’s
nice to know an officer has a woman’s welfare in mind. At the office party, all hell breaks loose,
with suspects brought in on a notorious drug case, where a few of the police
decide to take measures into their own hands, starting a full-blown riot in the
cellblock, all captured in photos on the front pages of the next day’s
newspapers, which causes some embarrassment to the department. Enter Edmund Exley, a poster boy for reform
and a man with blatant career ambitions to rise in the ranks, who refuses to
play by the same corrupt rules and jumps at the chance to rat against his
fellow officers, readily providing names of who started the fight to the
district attorney, using it as an opportunity for advancement, with several men
losing their jobs, where Exley is immediately ostracized as a traitor and
treated like a snake in their midst, with no one wanting to go anywhere near
him. Answering a call in homicide, which
has all but been abandoned, it leads him to a headlines grabbing case,
described as the massacre at the Nite Owl Coffee Shop, where a half dozen
people were shot and killed, including the girl with bandages seen in the car, then
piled up on top of one another in a rear bathroom, with the camera slowly
following a trail of blood, all captured in a highly suspenseful atmosphere of
dread. This case makes Exley’s career, first
in the exemplary manner in which he interrogates the suspects, brilliantly
turning one against the other, but after they escape, he goes after them like a
man possessed, killing one of them in the process, where he is immediately
promoted and commended with a medal of valor, though his actions are the exact
opposite of professional, as these men were merely suspects (wrongly accused,
it turns out), not convicted criminals.
What works so wonderfully in this film is a kinetic
fluidity, showing a dexterity and ease as it moves from scene to scene, with
detailed depictions of well-developed characters, who aren’t particularly
likeable, but they are completely exposed to viewers as they each have an
opportunity to redeem themselves, or fall further into a deepening morass of
immorality. The cinematography by Dante
Spinotti, who also shot Michael Mann’s HEAT (1995), is brilliant throughout, most
of it shot in the full light of day, accentuating realism and period accuracy,
like 50’s cars and clothing, also recognizable locations, while the music by
Jerry Goldsmith is very period oriented, using his original orchestrations of
sophisticated noir moods mixed with cool 50’s jazz along with pop tunes by Dean
Martin and Bing Crosby. One of the
wittiest scenes in the film involves Exley rousting a Lana Turner look-alike in
a bar (The Formosa Café), referring to her as a prostitute, that gets a drink
thrown in his face, as she turns out to be the real Lana Turner. Hilarious.
This is a very heady project, showing exemplary attention to detail, while
the story is nothing less than riveting, continually accumulating new evidence,
with Exley second-guessing himself, realizing his initial inclinations on the
Nite Owl case were premature, as black suspects were hung out to dry, taking
the fall for the real killers who remain at large, and may actually be within
the police force itself. One of the most
exquisitely written scenes does not come from the book, but is an original
addition, yet it becomes the heart of the film.
Exley and Vincennes are discussing re-opening the Nite Owl case, which
in effect is like an internal affairs investigation, as they’re forced to
examine their own interior souls. Exley
offers an off-hand explanation for why he became a cop in the first place,
attributing it to Rollo Tomasi, suggesting it’s a name he made up as a kid to
describe the man who killed his father, yet got away scot free, as his identity
was never discovered. Surprisingly,
Vincennes has a mysterious reawakening of his inner instincts, suddenly
passionate about the case he was working in, knocking on the door of Captain
Dudley Smith around midnight, asking him to recollect a case he once oversaw,
whose initial response is priceless, spoken with that Irish brogue that
beautifully rolls off the tip of his tongue, “Don’t start tryin’ to do the
right thing, boy-o. You haven’t the
practice.” What happens next is utterly
unnerving, capturing the audience completely off-guard, yet in the chaotic
shock of the moment, Vincennes amusingly mentions the name of Rollo Tomasi as
one of his leads, a name later repeated to Exley by the Captain, a brilliant
maneuver that identifies something only Exley could understand. While there’s an acceleration of people that suddenly
turn up dead, it isn’t until late in the film that Exley and White intersect,
each despising the other early on, holding entirely differing values, yet they
need each other if they intend to break this case wide open, exposing cover-ups
from the top, though it’s a masterstroke of writing how they eventually come
together, as it’s all about a girl, namely Lynn Bracken, the one person who
sees White for who he is and willingly embraces him, something Exley finds hard
to fathom. But these two guys, once they
finally start working together, elevate the film to new heights of inspired
filmmaking, adding a new amount of unbridled tension that literally explodes into
a final action sequence that does not disappoint, another fabrication that is
not in the novel, becoming a literal baptism of fire, a memorable scene that
plays out like a fog of war, as a moral line is definitely crossed in the
long-dormant search for personal redemption, where violating one’s personal
code of ethics to bring about a greater good suddenly falls into play, becoming
yet another stepping stone for Exley, who knows deep within himself that he’s
faced up to one of those unanswerable challenges in life, something few ever experience,
where it’s a miracle that he’s even alive, with White riddled with bullets, alive,
but a ghost of his former self. Perhaps
only we in the audience know the truth about what happened, having a front row
seat to it all, yet all else is eventually expunged from the official record as
life goes on, becoming yet another saga in the unending examples where justice
is truly blind.
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Life is Corrupt in
Los Angeles
essay by Eva Kennedy, June 5, 2012
“Come to Los Angeles!
The sun shines bright, the beaches are wide and inviting, and the orange groves
stretch as far as the eye can see. There are jobs aplenty, and land is cheap…
Life is good in Los Angeles... it’s paradise on Earth.”
Quite the opposite of the appearance of L.A., as described
in the opening quote (shown above), L.A. Confidential tells the story of the
reality of the dark, corrupt city of Los Angeles, in particular the Los Angeles
Police Department, or LAPD. In addition to the corrupt police officers, L.A.
contains sleazy reporters who publish pictures of well-known police figures
having sex with prostitutes, and crooked pornography thugs who cut prostitutes
to make them look like movie stars. In this particular story, Dudley Smith, a
police captain, and Pierce Patchett, a prostitution business head, kill the
leaders of the heroin ring in order to gain control over the heroin trafficking
themselves. Throughout the movie, Dudley Smith murders anyone he thinks knows
too much about this business on the side, including his fellow police officers
and even partner, Pierce Patchett. He covers
all this up of course, making sure that innocent citizens are blamed instead.
However, police officers Edmund Exley and Bud White discover his secret,
eventually murdering him and his fellow drug ring workers. Throughout the
movie, Exley is seen wearing and not wearing his glasses. When wearing these
glasses, Exley is able to see the corruption of the LAPD; when not wearing
them, he is just another part in it.
Exley is introduced, wearing his glasses, and talking with
Captain Smith about his desire to become a part of the detective bureau. Smith
asks him, “…Would you be willing to beat a confession out of a suspect you knew
to be guilty… Would you be willing to shoot a hardened criminal in the back, in
order to offset the chance that some lawyer…” Exley answers no to all of his
questions, saying “I don’t need to do it the way you did.” This displays that
he can see the corrupt treatment of law breakers, or even innocent citizens,
that LAPD partakes in, and he doesn’t want to be one of them. Dudley then says,
“At least get rid of the glasses. I can’t think of one Bureau man who wears
them.” But Exley doesn’t get rid of them, at least not yet, because he, unlike
the other detectives in the bureau, can see the corruption that the other
detectives have grown a part of.
Exley takes his glasses of for the first time when he gets
promoted to detective. With this newfound title, he feels the power that the
other corrupt police officers feel; he feels that he has the ability to walk on
water alongside them. In his first case as a detective, the Nite Owl restaurant
has a shooting, where all the customers present at the time were shot and
killed. It is thought that this was due to a burglary, and there are three
black suspects who already hold a police record. Exley, with his glasses off,
along with another officer Jack Vincennes, find them in their drug dealer’s
house, and shoot and kill the three suspects, along with everyone else inside
the house. Without any proved evidence against the suspects, Exley kills them.
And he kills all of the other people in the house who were unquestionably
innocent. For his actions, Exley is rewarded the medal of valor, the highest
bravery award in the LAPD. Exley is rewarded for his corrupt actions of killing
every single person in that house. This reward made Exley’s career, it made him
a big shot. From this point forward, Exley keeps his glasses off, joining in on
the corrupt acts that are a necessity for the famous hot shots of the LAPD.
However, eventually the outcome of the Nite Owl case really
bothers Exley. He discovers that the three suspects he convicted and killed
weren’t actually responsible for the restaurant murder. With this knowledge, he
puts his glasses back on, and talks to Vincennes about his discovered findings.
He tells him about Rollo Tomasi, a made up name given to the man that shot
Exley’s father and got away with it. He states, “Rollo Tomasi’s the reason I
became a cop. I wanted to catch the guys who thought they could get away with
it. It’s supposed to be about justice. Then somewhere along the way I lost
sight of that.” After he received his medal of valor reward and took off his
glasses, Exley turned a blind eye to the corruption of the LAPD, he “lost
sight” of it. Exley declares that he wants to solve the Nite Owl case the right
way this time, even if it means paying the consequences of shooting and killing
innocent men and bystanders. With his glasses on again, he is able to see the
corruption again, and wants to do everything in his power to try and stop it.
With his glasses still on, he and fellow police officer, Bud
White, discover the truth about the Nite Owl restaurant incident. Captain
Dudley Smith was responsible for the shooting. Another police officer, Dick
Stensland, was dining at the restaurant at the time, who Smith thought knew too
much about his heroin trafficking work, so he shot and killed him, along with
everyone else at the restaurant to ensure that no one could know that it was
him. With this knowledge, Exley and White start to hunt down Smith and anyone
else who may be connected to this case. White asks Exley, “Why are you doing
this? The Nite Owl made you. You wanna tear all that down?” And Exley responds,
“With a wrecking ball. Wanna help me swing it?” With his glasses, Exley is able
to see the disgustingly corrupt nature of Captain Smith, and will not let him
get away with his actions any longer. Exley and White finally meet Dudley and
his men, and both sides partake in a shooting spree against one another. Exley
and White prevail, and it is Exley who shoots Captain Dudley Smith, with his
glasses on.
Although Exley shot Smith and his fellow workers because he
was determined to end the corruption of the LAPD, Exley turned into a corrupt
police officer as well. He shot and killed several people, not even seeing or
knowing who they were. He assumed them to be the bad guy, working with Smith,
being just as corrupt as he. But that’s just it; he assumed all of it, just
like he assumed the Nite Owl suspects to be guilty when they weren’t.
Therefore, he stopped wearing his glasses for good. He is now just one in the
crowd of corrupt police officers. And unlike White, who chose to leave the
police force, Exley chose to stay part of the corruption.
With his glasses, Edmund Exley is able to distinguish
between the two sides of L.A.: the sunny appearance and the corrupt reality. He
is able to see that the appearance is not at all similar to the reality.
However, without his glasses, his understanding of the reality of L.A and the
LAPD disappears. With his one-sided view of just the appearance, he becomes a
part of the corrupt reality without even realizing it. Exley can be compared to
Nick Carraway, in The Great Gatsby. At first, both men can see the corruption
in their worlds: Nick can see the corruption present in the East and West Egg,
and Exley, in the LAPD. However, then both men get sucked into the corrupt
worlds of both New York and Los Angeles. Nick chooses to go to the crazy
parties of the rich world, continues hanging out with Daisy, Tom, Jordan, and
Gatsby, and even dates a rich, corrupt woman, Jordan. Exley blocks out the
corrupt world of the LAPD and becomes a part of it himself. However, eventually
Nick is again able to see the corruption and see what it has done to him.
Therefore, he leaves the corrupt world, and moves back to the Midwest. Exley,
unfortunately, does not have this realization. He stays with the LAPD, joining
its corrupt force.
