Each of the officers may be corrupt, but they are also in some way honorable. “L.A. Confidential” is the story of their redemptions and the ways each of them comes to terms with what serving the public really means. That story begins on a bad Christmas Eve, in which a pack of drunken police officers beat a group of migrant workers being held in the jail below the station. Exley tries to stop them but is thrown in his own cell. He testifies against the other officers, spitefully and gleefully. White, who was part of beating, refuses for an instant to betray the other officers, and is temporarily suspended, while Vincennes, when threatened with removal from his beloved “Badge of Honor,” is willing to testify against three officers about to retire anyway. This sets up the antagonism, and loyalty, that will last through the rest of the film: Exley is now hated, most of all by White, but he is willing to trust Vincennes who, like Captain Smith, is trying to keep White and Exley from a confrontation. This antagonism plays into the film’s central mystery, in which the three detectives investigate three separate crimes that seem intertwined to a shooting at a coffeeshop.
The coffeeshop shooting leads to conspiracies, corruption, prostitutes, and murder, while Exley and White butt heads along the way. Popping up in the course of their investigations are an expensive call girl (Kim Basinger in her Oscar-winning role), a corrupt district attorney (Ron Rifkin), and a definitively shady millionaire (David Straithairn). Basinger’s role isn’t written as well as she performs it; just by being world-weary, wise, and in her forties she adds a backstory of crushed dreams, and a level of childishness that her character is trying hard to muster. She, too, is corrupt, in her soul, and finds that she needs Officer White to help her, even as she helps him.
I’ve seen “L.A. Confidential” three or four times now. Most recently I realized that, like Shakespeare, the characters and their relationships could be lifted from their current situation and put into a half-dozen other scenarios, and their fates and interaction would still be the same. A glut of recent films have made abundantly clear that Othello’s revenge can be played on a basketball court, that Hamlet can mope on a skyscraper as well as a battlement, that old Andronicus need not be bound by any particular period, and that the Scottish play can transferred to a fastfood stand. The same, I realized, could be said of the interrelationships among the characters of “L.A. Confidential:” Ed Exley would still be a power-hungry but incorruptible smartypants, Jack Vincennes would still be greedy and fame-seeking but limited by a spark of morality, and Bud White would still be a well-meaning but inarticulate bully.
That isn’t to say that the noir, the police force, and the 1950s ambience of “L.A. Confidential” are all an unnecessary backdrop; all these elements are done exceptionally well, from the dialogue to the costumes to the direction, and especially the two gunbattles along the way. The art directors, in recreating Los Angeles in the 1950s, should especially be lauded; cinematographer Dante Spinotti (“The Insider,” “Manhunter,” and “Heat”), known for his deep urban canvases, never once lets 1997 creep back into frame. No matter how deep his shots are, the period décor lasts all the way to the end. But the power of “L.A. Confidential” comes from the subtle universality of its story of bad men trying to become better, and realizing it is a task that cannot be done alone.
Finished May 23, 2002.
Copyright 2002 Friday & Saturday Night