3 out of 5

Directed by: Curtis Hanson

I realize every decade of media – if not every year – could have an argument made for it as being especially impactful over others, but hey, I lived it, so I’ll raise my hand to be one of those making the argument for the 90s.

In terms of movies, and speaking in the broadest of strokes, while you certainly had so-called auteurs and striking visualizations in all of the decades prior, I feel like a move towards “independent” cinema had progressed from the perceived sleaze and B-variety of the 70s and 80s to something profitable and respectable in the 90s. When we start to name a handful of massively impactful directors and films that are referenced during the 00s and 2010s and 20s, beyond some set classic names, a lot of that stuff starts to pop out of the 90s. And L.A. Confidential was / is part of that conversation, but I’ve always felt like it’s more of a postscript: a streamlined reaction to the tonal trends. Which isn’t to say that Curtis Hanson’s film isn’t heavily stylized in its own right, or a bad movie, or even an overly “mainstream” one, just that by the time it rolled around, despite being one of the most distinctly “noir” flicks of that era and sticking to its James Ellroy-source material guns of hard-talkin’ language and double-crosses and dames and bad-good- cops and era-adjusted racism and sexism… it felt like we’d seen / heard this stuff before, but done with more gusto. Or, as I think I felt as a burgeoning filmster when watching it way back when, and feel more clearly reflected now: it’s a movie that seems like it should be a lot smarter than it is.

In L.A. Confidential, three 1950s cops who walk different walks – the political savvy up-and-comer (Guy Pearce); the no-snitching do-wrong-to-do-right knucklehead (Russell Crowe); and the zoned out Hollywood wannabe (Kevin Spacey) – end up convening, for their own reasons, on one case which threatens to shake up their relative worldviews: a seemingly open-and-shut the-black-guys-did-it murder rap that’s starting to seem an awful lot like a conspiracy. With definite echoes of Chinatown nihilism, our three detectives beat on each other and beat at the case, Brian Hegeland’s script going in rather disparate directions that namedrop one another, in such a sort of casually confusing fashion as to require a full-on explanatory scene towards the end of the plot literally being explained to us, line by line.

…Which I think is the “smarter than (it should be)” bit: as the complications aren’t really the complex, it’s just how the story is told. Similarly, much of this feels like artifice: the smart cop isn’t smart, nor is the dumb one dumb; the lighting / cinematography (Dante Spinotti) and Hanson’s framing are all gorgeous, and so, so controlled, but it often feels, at the same time, like we’re just going through some motions of lighting and framing. I’d say the move is something metatextual about soullessness, but it’s too committed for that: the actors are in it; Hanson is in it; I just, again, feel like this is skimming the surface of noir – like a memory of how it should be.

Reading a fair amount of the genre, pulp / noir has a magic trick to it: to keeping the reader on the same page as the lead detective; to making horrible people compelling. L.A. Confidential does that by doing the magic trick out of order. It is impeccably made, and the compelling performances, score, and niggling desire to see the case through are definitely enough to get us to the end of the trick. But I think there’s a lack of satisfaction in the reveal, as, subconsciously or not, we realize all that’s been done is to mix up the pieces, and had we seen them in their proper order, perhaps the picture might not have been as interesting.