L.A. Confidential

(Curtis Hanson, USA, 1997)

For years now I’ve been following the demented debate amongst screenwriters (and screenwriting teachers) about the number of main characters deemed proper in a motion picture.

I’ve elsewhere [in the book Mysteries of Cinema] given my rather dim view of the various norms and rules laid down in widely-used scriptwriting manuals. For the authors of these mostly uninspired and uninspiring books, the number of main characters should be kept to an absolute minimum.

There’s the hero, for whom you’re meant to feel sympathy, and the villain, for whom you’re meant to feel antipathy. There’s the love interest attached to the hero – often hanging off the side of the plot, but necessary for the romantic intrigue. Then there’s a gaggle of side-bar characters, subject to a strict, even vicious hierarchy: the less they have to do with the action, the less time they have actually on screen, the fewer dimensions there should be to their personalities. The result of this is a crowd of disposable, archetypical ciphers milling around the edges of most commercial films.

For me, the nadir of this discussion about character-plotting came when one expert got up after a screening of the John Sayles film about baseball-fixing, Eight Men Out (1988), and loudly proclaimed: “Eight men out? That’s about six men too many!”

In fact, it’s not hard to think of movies with a large number and variety of central characters – some that also do away with the narrative hierarchy of three-dimensional, two-dimensional and one-dimensional figures. Films including Jean Renoir’s classics, The Rules of the Game (1939) and The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936); most of Robert Altman’s films, from M*A*S*H (1970) to Kansas City (1996); Quentin Tarantino’s films, Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994); and a great many teen comedies of the 1980s set in schools or shopping malls or car factories – films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982) which seem like condensed proposals for some highly populated television sitcom.

I don’t underestimate the challenges of having many central characters in play – challenges of pacing and clarity, logistical problems of keeping the viewer in touch with where everyone is and what they’re doing at any given moment. But what you can gain in a multi-character narrative is considerable: many possibilities of variation in mood and rhythm, dramatic and comic juxtaposition, comparison and contrast – all of which help to create and build thematic ideas.

Sayles is not among my favourite artists of the multi-character structure, but he does take it on as a narrative and stylistic challenge in films like Lone Star (1996), City of Hope (1991) and Eight Men Out. In his work, you can see one of the main impulses behind multi-character stories: not to base a story not around a few special individuals, but instead to create a cross-section slice of society – a diagrammatic intersection where people from all walks are crossing paths at privileged moments of action.

Fritz Lang’s seminal serial killer classic M (1931) heralded this lesson long ago. It creates a dense web of many characters, in groups and clusters, around the fleeing child murderer played by Peter Lorre. Lang’s interest is not so much in the murder itself, or even the murderer and his motives – which is the case in just about every contemporary serial killer film. All that is just a pretext for Lang; what he really cared about was the portrait of an entire social system that this narrative device allowed. Cutting constantly from the lower depths to the high offices of law and power, showing how different social groups negotiate and use each other to make the next step in their games of power and control – Lang is able to map, in a breathtakingly economical and vividly diagrammatic way, the workings of this world. And you know what? This great film breaks virtually every rule in our current scriptwriting manuals.

L.A. Confidential is adapted from James Ellroy’s novel by the writer-director Curtis Hanson. I’ve been intrigued by Hanson since he co-wrote a fantastic Samuel Fuller movie, White Dog (1982). It’s about a “racist” dog – racist in the precise sense that it has been trained to kill black people. It’s a powerful tale with its own kind of social panorama, and also with a pleasingly lurid (but deadly serious) sense of political pulp melodrama.

Hanson later went on to direct a couple of thrillers that I admire: The Bedroom Window (1987), which has a touch of Brian De Palma, and that notorious tale of intimacy, paranoia and feminist backlash, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992). What I warm to in Hanson’s work: the issues he raises are not more important to him than his fanciful action-melodrama plots – which are sometimes dismissed by reviewers as mere schlock. But for him, the issues are fully embedded in tough actions and garish characters. I could not say the same for Sayles – his Lone Star looks like a sociological thesis in search of some generic storyline to illustrate it.

If there’s a lot of garbage talked these days about what kinds of stories, and how many main characters you need, to make a movie, there’s also some rather impoverished wisdom about what constitutes a cinematic theme or subject. There’s often the assumption that a theme is something that you should be able to boil down to a sentence or phrase – or a rather sanctimonious question for classroom discussion (eg., “when is it justifiable to kill another human being?”). This attitude leads to films which leadenly illustrate, over and over, some simplistic premise, proverb or moral lesson. The truth is that most movies can be boiled down to a theme-phrase or two, but a one-sentence message is not the same thing as the dramatic truth of a story. Such dramatic truth has to build, piece by piece, finally to burst forth in your mind at a certain moment of the film, like an epiphany or revelation.

L.A. Confidential wields that punch of dramatic truth. If I were to say, in conventional journalistic reviewing shorthand, what the film is about, it wouldn’t necessarily sound too exciting. It deals in subjects of the cop thriller genre that are almost proverbial, if not downright clichéd: everybody is corrupt or at least corruptible, we all have a dark side, society is a cesspool churned by greed and power … and so on.

It’s also obligatory to make an immediate comparison between L.A. Confidential and Roman Polanski’s justly enshrined Chinatown (1974) – especially since both films use the type of labyrinthine, knotty film noir plot that links up problems of intimate life with wider swirls of pervasive social control and disintegration. Part of the understanding of that structure in L.A. Confidential comes from Hanson’s gifted co-writer, Brian Helgeland – whose excellent script for Richard Donner’s Conspiracy Theory (1997) explores equally unsettling connections between the personal and the political.

L.A. Confidential gives us a range of central characters. Bud (Russell Crowe) is a cop with a violent, rebel streak who, somewhat paradoxically, also has a fierce moral sense – because he abhors the domestic abuse of women, which he knows all too well from his own past. This is the archetypal James Ellroy anti-hero – James Woods played a similar figure to perfection in another Ellroy adaptation, the terrific Cop (James B. Harris, 1988). Bud in L.A. Confidential is afflicted by an original sin tainting the masculine soul – he sees violence, gets caught up in it and perpetuates it, at the same moment that he’s righteously trying to stamp it out and put a halt to this infernal cycle. There’s a touch of Abel Ferrara’s movies here.

Bud’s opposite number is Ed (Guy Pearce), a Clark Kent type, with a permanent, square-jawed, boy-scout grin, but Kent with a dark side – since he reveals himself, at key moments, to be a canny, and even fierce, career opportunist. Another key character in this fresco is Jack, played with superb, slimy charm by Kevin Spacey – he’s the glamour cop of the force, in a symbiotic professional relationship with a very shifty and manipulative tabloid reporter, Sid (Danny DeVito).

The plot slowly uncovers the links between these characters and others including police chief Smith (James Cromwell) and a “whore with a heart of gold”, Lynn (Kim Basinger) – with whom Bud becomes romantically enmeshed. Along the way, we inuit the workings of various institutions and networks, above and below ground – such as a high-class prostitution ring based on a gruesome practice of plastic surgery, and the making of a Dragnet-style TV cop show.

The true subject of the film, ultimately, is its attempt to show various parts of the social machine – police, the underworld, government, the mass media, networks that are officially sanctioned or maintained in clandestine mode – and the way they all interlock. It’s the general goal of Ellroy’s fiction, as The Black Dahlia (1987) also demonstrates. [Note: James B. Harris also acquired the screen adaptation rights for that property, which eventually came to fruition as directed by Brian De Palma in 2006 – an underrated film.]

As a dramatic essay on the machine or system of social power, L.A. Confidential reminds me of many gangster movies. As in that genre (whose workings I’ve outlined in the 1987 essay “Mr Big” [collected in Mysteries of Cinema]), it’s crucially important that the entire system is in some fundamental way unstable: the balance of power can shift at any moment, in unexpected, unpredictable ways. This is where L.A. Confidential also becomes a story about individuals. These individuals are more or less determined by their position in the overall scheme of things, but they still possess a margin of freedom – and their mad, passionate, scared, righteous actions can sometimes alter the Bigger Picture.

This relation of individuals to the society that frames them becomes especially dynamic and volatile when the characters are, as they are here, complex psychological and moral cases. As Linda Manz says in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), “you just have half-angel and half-devil in you” – and everybody here complies with that rule. Each of them has their cagey arrangements with the system, and they all have someone or something they want to keep and protect. True to the gangster form, there’s an extreme tension in L.A. Confidential between the fierce self-interest of each individual, and the bonds that they form – almost reluctantly – with others, binding them to moral obligations, or to the duties of love and friendship.

The sinuous, carefully constructed narrative development of L.A. Cofidential relies on a difficult, demanding pattern. Just about every character turns at some key moment, suddenly revealing some hitherto hidden fact of their character – their angel or demon. This hands the actors in the fine ensemble cast a particular challenge: they are not allowed to telegraph this turn before it happens, and yet, when it comes, it has to be believable in retrospect. Surprising, yet inevitable. Of all the performers, Cromwell handles this hide-and-seek game best.

I’ve heard L.A. Confidential described as merely an enjoyably trashy slab of pulp – because of its period setting, its revelling in tabloid sleaziness, and its unashamed air of action-melodrama. But this is to deny the film its seriousness and its power. In truth, it is among the most impressive and ambitious mainstream movies of late 1990s.

In its raucous laughs, and in its shocks and thrills – in its pulp dramatic truths – it gives you a close, tingling, creeping sense of what it’s like to move in the shadows and side-streets of a world that is slowly crumbling down around you.

MORE Hanson: In Her Shoes, 8 Mile

© Adrian Martin November 1997