I watch a considerable number of movies. It is my pastime, my hobby, my sport, and my passion. Normally I go through mediocre film to mediocre film, occasionally coming across something that I know excels and brings together great pieces to create a greater whole. But with enough of those, even exceptionally good films can become mundane. Then finally I come across a film that surpasses all of my expectations, challenges my concepts of modern film making, and leaves me breathless. I feel blessed to have seen L.A. Confidential which has punched a hole in my ideas of neo-noir, and what it means to reinterpret a style.
The glamour and gilded beauty of the 1950's are beautifully captured in one of the best whodunit films that I have ever seen. An impossibly complex script weaves together three cops of different backgrounds, motives, and styles to hunt down the murders of six people in a diner, including a recently disgraced officer. Layer upon layer of increasingly complicated narrative brings these men into a world of prostitution, drugs, corruption, and ruthless violence, as well as closer to a dangerous and shocking truth about their own world of L.A.P.D. politics.
Guy Pearce stars as Edmund Exley, the new golden boy of the force trying to live up to the legend that was his father--and he does a pretty bang-up job of it. With him (more against him maybe) is Bud White (Russell Crowe), the bully of the force with a buzz cut, a raging temper, and a passionate stance against violence towards women. Also there is Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey), a skeezy hero of their precinct who spends his time working with the editor of Hush-Hush Magazine (Danny DeVito ) to take down law breaking celebrities, though he views the work as his 15 minutes of fame. These unlikely partners are forced together by circumstance when the facts around the case don't add up, pinning the wrap on three black teens whose only crimes were drugs and sodomy.
Bud becomes involved with high end prostitute who works for a pimp whose girls all look like movie stars. This Veronica Lake lookalike (played with striking resemblance by Kim Basinger) has motives of her own, and is certainly not the femme fatale that she might portray. Don't judge too quickly though, this is complex performance of a complex woman whose connections might be too much for her to handle. Is her pimp behind the murders? Why does there always seem to be a strange third party? And who would gain from killing cops and gangsters?
This film, like Goodfellas, is not a period piece, though at first glance it might suggest it is. This film was so exciting to me because it is obvious that those involved with the making of this picture lived and breathed its inspiration. Much the same that Chinatown did in the 70's, this film has taken the content and the style of the time and has reinterpreted it for the mid-90's audience. It did not try to copy the acting, directing, etc. of the noir films of the 40's and 50's. Instead the 1950's were recreated and fueled with the gritty realism, and blistering pace that a mob movie of our generation might be more inclined to do. It was a film inspired by its predecessors, but not enslaved to their concept, and it therefore created something entirely new.
This movie is bloody, brutal, and best of all it is unflinching--even though its audience might. There were moments of extreme tension released with such riveting, explosive acting and action, that I could not help but be swept away by this film. It crept under my skin slowly, but a third of the way in I was hooked, and with a pace that built to a crescendo and one of the best shootouts that I have even seen, I finished the film and immediately wanted to see it again. It was three steps ahead of me at all times, but I didn't care because it had reeled me in hook, line, and sinker.
Everything about this movie was stellar from its Oscar worthy acting, to its tremendous directing, fabulous sets, beautiful, smoggy, rust colored palate, and its sensational script. This is without a doubt one of my new favorite films, and one of the most exciting, cinematic discoveries that I have made in a good long while. Go out of your way to experience this film.
4/4
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