America in the 1950s was a land of contrasts. On the one hand, for some, the good times were rolling: the economy was doing great, and pop culture exploded with the rise of television, comic books, rock and roll, cool cars and youthful rebellion. On the other hand there was a dark, seedy underbelly: racism was still widespread and normalized, the Cold War had everyone scared of Communism and/or nuclear holocaust, and what the mob didn't control, the police did — assuming they weren't working together. It's this heady soup that Curtis Hanson wants to serve you, a picture that evokes all the light and shadow of the 1950s, an era that was seeing a major cultural moment at the time as boomers, realizing they were rapidly approaching middle age, began to wax nostalgic about an era they barely remembered. (The 1960s and 70s were also seeing a big jump in popularity, again due in part to boomer insecurities.) He took a story by James Ellroy, threw in a bunch of 1950s nostalgia bait, added some handsome young actors and Kevin Spacey, cooked up a gripping neo-noir thriller about police corruption in the LAPD (Ellroy's stock in trade, an oddity considering how much he glazes the police — all part of his weird personal politics) and called it L.A. Confidential.
L.A. Confidential is in a lot of ways the quintessential late-'90s period piece: razor-sharp cinematography, plenty of profanity, and the undeniable presence of Los Angeles itself, the city a living, breathing creature, glittering and sun-drenched and yet rotten underneath. Russell Crowe, at the time a fresh face from New Zealand, plays Bud White, a rough-and-tumble cop who's not afraid to use violence to get what he wants and despises women-beaters. Australian actor Guy Pierce is Ed Exley, smooth and slick and by-the-book, a consummate politician and manipulator with no patience for police behaving badly. And finally there's Kevin Spacey as Jack Vincennes, a fame-chasing narcotics detective who colludes with a local tabloid to score headlines on celebrity arrests. We also get Kim Basinger as Lynn Bracken, a high-class hooker White comes into contact with during his investigations and winds up coming back to while off the job.
The plot is all tangled up like a nest of snakes, and if you're not paying close attention you're going to get lost right away. We've got it all: police corruption, mass murder, racism, mob warfare, a whole lot of missing heroin, people turning up dead left and right, and a badly miscast Mickey Cohen (why Paul Guilfoyle? the world will never know.) With three characters all running their own investigations into a massacre at a late-night diner, it can sometimes be a bit dizzying keeping track of it all, especially since the mystery of who's behind the murder of several of Cohen's former soldiers (Cohen himself being in prison) is kept tantalizingly out of reach almost to the end of the film, only for the answer to reveal itself suddenly, brutally and without warning. It all starts to fall into place after that, but it remains to be seen how it's all going to play out.
I don't like Ellroy. I think he's kind of a reactionary weirdo who worships the LAPD and despite his stories constantly touching on police corruption he keeps trying to finesse it by writing entire books out of the "one bad apple" argument. And I don't have to tell you that The Black Dahlia, his book on Elizabeth Short's murder, and its movie adaptation, spat on Short's memory and went some seriously weird directions. But L.A. Confidential as a film is a triumph, one of those perfect crime thrillers that despite its 1950s trappings feels timeless. You can feel its influence in everything from L.A. Noire to 2022's The Batman. It's so good I'm even willing to forgive Kevin Spacey in it — but keep that one hush-hush.
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