The Great Movies III

Vincennes will be one of the film's protagonists. The other two cops are Officer Bud White (Russell Crowe), who believes in bending the law to enforce it, and Detective Ed Exley (Guy Pearce), a straight-arrow type whose self-righteous morality gets on the department's nerves. These three cops, so different from one another, all possess some essential quality of honor that draws them together in untangling the film's web of corruption.

For much of its running time, L.A. Confidential seems episodicone sensational event after another, with no apparent connection. Mickey Cohen, the head of organized crime in L.A., has just been sent to prison, and now hit squads are rubbing out his top lieutenants. A millionaire named Pierce Patchett (David Strathairn) has sidelines in slick porn and high-priced call girls, and specializes in prostitutes who have had plastic surgery to make them resemble movie stars. A bunch of drunken cops beat up Mexican suspects and get their photos on the front page. Exley and Vincennes, for quite different reasons, testify against their fellow officers, breaking the department's code of silence. There's a massacre at the downtown Nite Owl Cafe, and a cop is one of the victims. Calling sternly for justice to be done in all of these cases is ramrod-stiff Capt. Dudley Smith (James Cromwell), who presides at morning roll call.

The plot, based on the novel by James Ellroy, can only be described as labyrinthine. For long periods, we're not even sure that it is a plot, and one of the film's pleasures is the way director Curtis Hanson and writer Brian Helgeland put all the pieces into place before we fully realize they're pieces. How could these people and events possibly be related? We don't much mind, so long as the pieces themselves are so intriguing.

Consider the business of the call girls who have been "cut" to make them look like movie stars. One of them, Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger), looks like Veronica Lake, but the truth is, she's never had plastic surgery. White tracks her down because she's the friend of a girl who was killed at the Nite Owl. Then he pays a return visit because he is powerfully attracted to her, and they fall into bed without having had six words of personal conversation. Is that typical behavior for a hooker? Does she have another motive? As the Basinger character plays out, her motives and real feelings coil about one another, creating a deep and sympathetic character. Despite Crowe, Pearce, and Spacey, it may be Basinger who gives the film's best performance. Her speech to Exley, about how she sees Bud White, is a monologue as simple as it is touching.

White has compromised himself by sleeping with a potential witness. He is also in deep with Captain Smith, who uses him as a strong-arm man to beat up "suspects," including out-of-town mobsters (the message: go home). Vincennes compromises himself by ratting on fellow cops, something he says he would never do-until his job on the TV show is threatened. And the straight-arrow Exley believes he could never bend the official rules of conduct, until he discovers that sometimes they need bending.

It would be unfair for me to even hint at some of the directions the story takes. Let me instead describe superb moments. One of the most famous comes when Vincennes and Exley enter the Formosa Cafe, a Chinese restaurant close the Paramount lot, to question the mobster Johnny Stompanato. He's with a date, who gives them some lip. Exley tells her to shut up: "A hooker cut to look like Lana Turner is still a hooker." Notice how the camera frames Exley in foreground and holds Vincennes in background, as he confides, "She is Lana Turner."This line, one of the movie's most famous, works so well, I think, because of the particular way Spacey delivers it, and the little smile he allows himself, and because Hanson does it in the same shot; a cutaway to Vincennes would have been all wrong.

Vincennes has another emotionally wrenching experience involving a beefcake "actor" named Matt, who he first met during a bust set up by Hush-Hush. Now Hudgens has a scheme to lure the D.A. into a "sissy" scenario with Matt, and uses Vincennes to help convince the gullible kid this favor could open the door for him on the TV ("Like Badge of Honor is gonna want him after he's been cover boy for Hush-Hush twice in a year," Hudgens gloats). How this assignation ends, and how Spacey as Vincennes reacts, amounts to a self-contained scenario on shame.

Consider, too, the choreography after two of the characters burst into the district attorney's office. The D.A. tries to put them off with a clever line about "good cop, bad cop," until he finds out in a horrifying way what "bad cop" can really mean. I've seen endless hours of violence in movies over the years, but hardly anything to equal what happens to the D.A. in a minute or two.