Curtis Hanson’s crime thriller makes a complicated mystery gripping through the people trying to solve it. The ensemble is persuasive throughout, though the women receive less of the writers’ attention than the men.
L.A. Confidential takes us into a city where the police, organised crime and the press are dangerously close. Curtis Hanson’s adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel is an absorbing, forceful crime thriller, and we recommend it with one reservation: its fascination with hard men sometimes limits its curiosity about everybody else. The screenplay, by Hanson and Brian Helgeland, makes a crowded mystery intelligible without making it feel simple. It expects us to pay attention to people as closely as we follow the case.
That matters because the corruption in this 1950s Los Angeles depends on personal weaknesses as much as criminal schemes. The script gives us enough reason to understand the attraction of influence, protection and publicity, then makes us consider who pays for them. There is plenty to keep track of, but the story seldom feels like an examination we might fail. Hanson’s control of the ensemble lets a change in someone’s manner matter as much as another piece of information.
Russell Crowe’s Bud White is the most immediate reason to keep watching. Crowe makes physical force look useful and almost comforting, which makes the performance troubling. We felt uneasy about how readily we warmed to him; his physical assurance makes it tempting to excuse the violence. Guy Pearce’s Ed Exley provides a less comfortable kind of authority, tight and watchful enough to make principle look like hard work. Their differences keep the film tense even when the plot has paused to explain itself.
Kevin Spacey’s Jack Vincennes brings a different pleasure: the sense of a man who knows how to hold an audience. Spacey’s ease keeps the ensemble from becoming a competition in clenched jaws, while Danny DeVito’s Sid Hudgens adds a welcome, grubby humour. Kim Basinger’s Lynn Bracken has the harder task of making a person visible through the film’s interest in her appearance. She succeeds, but Hanson and Helgeland give the men more scope to be contradictory. That imbalance is the film’s clearest limitation.
Dante Spinotti’s cinematography makes the period setting inviting enough for the violence to disturb its good looks. There is no need to keep the whole city in darkness to persuade us that something is wrong with it. Jeannine Oppewall’s production design gives the period a solidity that helps the actors inhabit it without seeming put on display. The surroundings make this Los Angeles credible, and Hanson is sensible enough to keep the actors in charge of our attention.
Peter Honess’s editing keeps the separate strands moving at a pace that allows suspicion to build without losing the thread. At 138 minutes, the film has room to complicate our first impressions, and it mostly uses that room well. Jerry Goldsmith’s score supplies tension without doing the actors’ worrying for them. Together, the cutting and music sustain the pleasure of a densely plotted thriller, though there are passages when the amount of information briefly outweighs the people delivering it.
Crime thrillers can become pleased with themselves for noticing that respectable institutions harbour criminals. Hanson avoids much of that smugness by making the people inside those institutions worth watching, even when their behaviour repels us. We share the critics’ admiration for the storytelling, with a little less patience for how narrowly the film distributes its sympathy. Give it an uninterrupted evening, and resist deciding too quickly which officer deserves your confidence.
