27.11.1997

Style and reality in LA

Andrew MacKay reviews 'LA Confidential', directed by Curtis Hanson

Overtly, this is not a political film, but it is one of those pictures which tells us much about society and the times in which we live now. And this despite the fact that ‘LA Confidential’ is actually set in the early 1950s.

The plot, based on a novel by James Ellroy, is highly complex and has a number of red herrings. Essentially, it is the story of three policemen, played by Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce and Kevin Spacey. All three are macho cops of different types, but all are in fact subtly damaged. Crowe’s character is physical and brutal, but with a psychological need to protect women in distress, a result of watching his mother beaten to death by his father.

Pearce’s character is ‘honest’ in a crooked department, but manically ambitious because of his need to live up to a father who was a hero.

Spacey’s character is superficially a cynical and streetwise cool cat who makes a profit on the side by setting up people to be exposed in compromising situations by the scandal sheet LA Confidential.

He is fascinated by the superficial glitz and glamour of LA and Hollywood, because it fills a void in his own life. But he has a crisis of conscience after arranging a crooked date between a bisexual unemployed actor and an important official. Later he tries to cancel the deal, only to find that the actor has been murdered.

Crowe and Spacey originally joined the police force for idealistic reasons but were corrupted by it, while Pearce is a clean-cut new boy who gets tangled in a web of deceit.

The illusion and reality theme is not confined to them. For example, Kim Basinger plays a high-class prostitute who is made up to look like the actress Veronica Lake; her colleagues look like other famous film actresses, sometimes with the help of plastic surgery. The funniest scene in a rather relentless and hard-boiled film is when Pearce’s character throws a drink over a woman he thinks is a prostitute made up to look like Lana Turner. It is in fact the real Lana Turner.

Los Angeles itself is part of the illusion. The opening credits of the film show scenes from a kind of promotional newsreel about the city as a sunny place where everyone has a job. In fact, LA in the film is rife with racial conflict, social oppression and corruption. And although set 40 years ago, the beginnings of today’s world are discernible: one scene shows the start of construction on the LA Freeway. Long since completed, it is one of the largest road arteries in the world and a major cause of pollution.

Despite these links to the present, the evocation of another time is very skilfully done, and the film is visually breathtaking, quite apart from the acting and the script. I expect ‘LA Confidential’ to do well at the next Oscar ceremony. Moreover, it will actually deserve to.

Andrew MacKay