This generation's "Chinatown"...

Rating: Null/10 (13 September 2000)

"Come to Los Angelos...it's Paradise on Earth. Hahaha...that's what they tell ya anyway." Danny Devito's opening voiceover sets the mood for the one of the moodiest and best film noirs ever released from the dream factory that is Hollywood. I first heard about "L.A. Confidential", appropiately enough, from looking at the ad for it on the back of a tabloid. While I'd not heard of Ellroy prior to this film's release, I was shocked to find out that one of his first novels, "Blood on the Moon", served as the basis for one of the most foul-mouthed, brutal, and, to my mind, underrated films on the market, "Cop". No matter; my subsequent reading of Ellroy's work proves to me that the man is at his best by using the known facts of history as a prybar for showing the rot underneath the veneer.
Curtis Hanson remarked, in a documentary about the film, that as he read the book and was introduced to the three main guys (Bud White, Jack Vincenes, and Edmond Exley), he found that he didn't like them. That would seem to parallel my own reactions to them. Bud White scared the hell out of me. Jack Vincenes, for all his smooth charm, disgusted me. Ed Exley, with his wimpy exterior, reminded me a little too much of the kid I used to be. Every one of these cops are corrupt to various extents. But all that changes with the Nightowl Massacre.
At roughly the halfway point of the film, when the whole business of the Nightowl killings have been "resolved", all three of these guys come to the exact same conclusion: this isn't what it's supposed to be all about. It winds up putting them on a collision course for the real culprits behind the crime and for two of these guys, the price of defiance turns out to be astronomical.
What fascinated me the most about this film was it's use of actual history, be it Mickey Cohen, Johnny Stompanato, Lana Turner, the opening night of "Worlds Collide", or the beginning of the construction of the Santa Monica Boulevard. These bits of historical grounding act as a wall that the story bounces off of like a racquet ball. Like "Chinatown", Hanson and Helgelund (and, of course, Ellroy before them) make no bones about the fact that the official histories of 1950's L.A. are just sanitized versions of the real thing. Unlike "Chinatown", however, the movie doesn't end on a note of hopelessness, though not in the traditional "justice has been served" wrap-up, either.
It struck me, especially considering Hanson's comments on the naturalistic lighting scheme employed by Dante Spinotti, that this piece could almost be considered anti-noir. By that, I mean, it uses the noir conventions that date back to Hollywood's "Golden Age", but in a way that sets a somewhat different tone. It's not hopelessness, as I've pointed out, but it's not the uplifting feel-good kind of mood, either. It is its own thing. It will be interesting to see if a movie that follows that sort of pattern is made within the next few years.