Neo-Noir for the Nineties

Rating: 8/10 (20 April 2006)

The last of the classic films noirs were made in the late fifties or early sixties, but there have been later films which, while dispensing with the characteristic, moody, black-and-white look of film noir, attempt to capture something of its spirit, a development which has been called "neo-noir". Perhaps the best-known neo-noir was Polanski's "Chinatown" from the seventies, and "L.A. Confidential" can be seen as a "Chinatown" for the nineties. Both films are period pieces, set some forty years before they were made. Both are set in the Los Angeles area, as were many of the classic noirs. Both are in colour rather than black-and-white, but both have a typically complex noir plot, involving widespread corruption and wrongdoing.
"L.A. Confidential" is set in the Los Angeles of the 1950s. The heroes are three officers of the city's police force, with very different characters. The classic films noirs generally took a cynical view of human nature, and neo-noir has followed this tradition. All three men can be seen as flawed heroes. Bud White is a man of action, with a violent, unpredictable streak, not above beating up suspects he believes to be guilty or planting evidence on them to secure a conviction. Bud's particular anger is reserved for men who use violence against women; at the root of this lie bitter memories of his own childhood, when his mother was murdered by his father.
Like Bud, Edmund Exley has lost a parent to violence; his father, himself a police officer, was murdered by a criminal. In other respects, however, he seems to be Bud's exact opposite. Exley is a quiet, calm officer who insists on doing everything by the book, refusing to use Bud's methods to obtain a conviction, even when encouraged to do so by his cynical superior Captain Dudley Smith. When a group of officers bring the force into disrepute by beating up a number of Mexican detainees, Exley is prepared to earn the hatred of his colleagues by naming names. Exley's flaw is that he seems too good to be true. His sense of integrity can coincide too neatly with his own advantage; we sense that he informs on his colleagues not because he cares for justice for the Mexicans but in order to advance his own career.
Jack Vincennes also leaves us with the impression that he is uninterested in justice. Indeed, he does not seem very interested in police work at all. His main interest is his lucrative sideline as adviser to a TV cop show which enables him to mix with actors and other glamorous celebrities. Vincennes also has a corrupt deal with Sid Hudgens, the editor of a scandal-mongering magazine called "Hush-Hush", whereby he will, in exchange for money, provide Hudgens with information about which celebrities are about to be arrested on drugs or vice charges.
The three are brought together by the investigation into the shooting of a number of patrons of a diner called "The Night Owl". At first it seems that the killings were carried out in the course of a robbery, but it emerges that the suspected robbers arrested in connection with the crime are in fact innocent. As inquiries proceed, the three officers begin to uncover an increasingly complex web of corruption and crime, involving Hudgens's magazine, a businessman who runs a brothel where the prostitutes have had plastic surgery to look like famous film stars, the police themselves, and the struggle to inherit the empire once controlled by the city's now-imprisoned gangland boss. The three have never been friends- indeed Exley and White hate one another, partly because White was one of the men fingered by Exley, partly because of rivalry over Lynn, the beautiful Veronica Lake look-alike from the brothel. Nevertheless, they find that they must work together in order to survive.
Unlike some, I was not too concerned that this film did not win the "Best Picture" Oscar, as "Titanic", although a very different film, is nevertheless a good one in its own right. I was, however, surprised that there was not a single "Best Actor" nomination for the male leads, Russell Crowe as White, Guy Pearce as Exley and Kevin Spacey as Vincennes, as all three are excellent, with equally good support from Danny de Vito as Hudgens and James Cromwell as Captain Smith. (This was the film that first brought Crowe and Pearce, both Antipodeans, to public notice). I was delighted by Kim Basinger's "Best Supporting Actress" award, as this confirmed what I had long suspected, namely that she is a major talent as well as a major-league beauty. She brings a touching freshness and innocence to the role of Lynn, even though she was already in her mid-forties at the time.
The success of this film is due as much to the direction as to the acting. Curtis Hanson had made some good films before this one, notably "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle" and "The River Wild", but those were both in the standard thriller mould. "L.A. Confidential" is something more than that. Like the films noirs that served as Hanson's model, it effectively conjures up an atmosphere of decadence and sleaze, touching upon the darker side of human nature. One of the best crime films of the nineties. 8/10