Cinema
LA Confidential (18, selected cinemas)
Burrows of deceit
Mark Steyn
You expect movies to have problems with Jane Austen or Henry James, but what's depressing is the way they seem to have difficulty even managing their own relatively simple genres: every week it seems brings a thriller where not a single thing makes sense. Mel Gibson's Conspira- cy Theory is like that: it starts off perfectly fine with a paranoid cabbie, suddenly lurches into Manchurian Candidate territo- ry and winds up with one of those villains who has plenty of opportunity to kill Mel but never does because he wants to toy with him. Like so many films, it's a K-Tel compilation album of bits which work fine in other movies.
It comes as a surprise then that Brian Helgeland, who wrote Conspiracy Theory, and Curtis Hanson, whose directing career to date has consisted of cranking out ami- able formula stuff like The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, should have done such a fine job with James Ellroy's dense hallucinatorY crime novel of the early Fifties, LA Confi- dential. You miss Ellroy's chopped-up pseudo-bop voice for about 40 seconds, but, by the time Johnny Mercer's singing `Ac-cent-tchu-ate The Positive' over the opening titles, you're relishing instead all the qualities a movie can add: the grubby glamour of Dante Spinotti's cinematogra- phy, the voluptuous menace in Jerry Gold- smith's score — even the household rodents arrive with a string section. It's Christmas_ Eve in Los Angeles: Dino's on the hifi, a husband batters his wife under the Yuletide lights, and down at the precinct the LAPD does much the same to a bunch of hapless Mexicans. Some of the names that crop up are real — Mickey Cohen, the crime boss whose incar- ceration prompts a run of gangland slayings by would-be successors; Johnny Stompana- to, the thug with the classy dame who wound up in the city's starriest (pre-0J) murder trial. Ellroy knows this world well his mother's murder has remained unsolved for 40 years. But most of the characters are his own, especially the three cops: Bud White, a thick-set, seething street tough; Edward Exley, a bespectacled pencil-necked rookie loathed by his com- rades; and Jack Vincennes, a morally relaxed dandy who acts as paid adviser to a Dragnet knock-off on television by day and plays LA's celebrity crime-stopper by night. The film introduces almost all its charac- ters as types — a suggestion here, a gesture there, and we assume, having seen so many cop thrillers, that we know them already. At which point, ever so unobtrusively, they begin to trade places. Just as the film blends real events with fiction, so its cast mixes familiar Hollywood faces with complete unknowns. Hanson has gone to the furthest reaches of the British Empire for half his principals — the Antipodeans Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce play White and Exley, respectively; James Cromwell, last seen as Babe's farmer, plays a weather-beaten police cap- tain, Dudley Smith. On the other hand, the fashionable Kevin Spacey plays Vincennes, hovering suavely between self-satisfaction and self- loathing. 'Why'd you become a cop?' asks Exley. Vincennes pauses, gazes across the room and says blankly, 'I don't remember.' It to Spacey's credit that you're not quite sure what's going through him at that moment, even as the plot conspires to give hun a chance to remember.
Danny DeVito is a sleazeball gossip ped- dler, Kim Basinger is a novelty whore, and perhaps the most pleasurable aspect of the entire movie is that billing is irrelevant: after a summer of so-called 'ensemble' pic- tures in which the cast are picked off in order of cheque size, it's almost bewilder- ing to be confronted by a film that stacks 9p a Hamlet-style body count while disdain- ing the traditional formulae. You have no Way of knowing who'll make it to the end. That this should seem unusual speaks vol- tunes for Hollywood's dreary obsession with 'packages'. If there's a character who sums up the film it's the one who could so easily have brought the whole edifice crashing down. Kull Basinger plays Lynn Bracken, the aspiring actress who caught the bus to Hol- lywood and wound up a hooker. 'It's still acting,' she points out. And it is: Lynn Works for the Fleur de Lys, which specialis- es in girls who've been 'cut' (plastic surgery) and coiffed to look like your favourite movie stars. Lynn is the Veronica Lake lookalike. Of course, she doesn't look like Veronica Lake so much as a sad, shop- worn Kim Basinger. But Basinger is terrific as a hard-edged, half-defeated romantic, As yet another man crosses her threshold, the turntable plays Gershwin — 'They're writing songs of love/But not for me .. somehow what should be a crass statement of the obvious instead hints at other possi- ullities. Basinger as Bracken as Lake gets to the heart of LA Confidential, a high-style celebration of the burrows of deceit that make up Los Angeles. For, in a city found- L' on make-believe, who cares what's real? The film doesn't answer that philosophical conundrum, but, in one of several inge- nious diversions, it does use it as the basis for an excellent Lana Turner joke.
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