L.A. Insubstantial
PODHORETZ, JOHN
LA Insubstantial It's Just a Melodrama By John Podhoretz ? ? s—ome here, Sidney, and let I me chastise you." So says V»_^/a corrupt cop to Tony Curtis before he beats Curtis to a pulp in 1957's...
...In the 1960s and 1970s, when politicians and cops and military men and rich people all became the moral equivalents of gangsters in Hollywood's post-Vietnam reckoning, the idea at least had a little novelty...
...Confidential by every paper in the country, reveals yet again that people who spend their lives in movie theaters soon forget what the world around them is actually like...
...The beauty of Sweet Smell of Success is that, despite its highly realistic look, it is at its heart as stylized, moralistic, and fantastically violent as a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale...
...If you have been reading reviews of L.A...
...freeway system...
...The third is Bud White (Russell Crowe), who has both the impassivity and the terminally violent streak of a pit bull...
...Such a movie would haunt us on the drive home, make us think...
...if anything bad is going on among the rank-and-file cops, it turns out that such ill behavior pales in comparison with the behavior of the politically savvy types at the top...
...The second is Ed Exley (Guy Pearce), the straight-arrow son of a famous detective who agrees to turn informant on a bunch of other cops in order to get his own detective badge...
...Confidential, the new movie about corrupt cops at loose in Los Angeles in the 1950s, you may have gotten the impression that it is a blistering look into the dark heart of the American past...
...Confidential is nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is, and is riddled with modern Hollywood cliches...
...A movie like L. A. Confidential, which prides itself on its complex and nuanced view of human behavior, is no more disturbing to our cliche-ridden sense of America and its institutions than a Muzak version of "Why Don't We Do It In The Road" would be...
...Confidential is also a fairy tale run riot, a story of John Podhoretz is deputy editor of The Weekly Standard...
...Bud White, who seems like a psychopath at the beginning, turns out to be a man of twisted honor by the end...
...The movie tells the story of three cops who each get hold of a single strand in a tangled murder-and-cor-ruption case...
...But don't be fooled...
...Confidential is a movie that has absolutely nothing of value on its mind...
...The system is, of course, inherently unjust...
...Still, L.A...
...Like Sweet Smell of Success, L.A...
...So says V»_^/a corrupt cop to Tony Curtis before he beats Curtis to a pulp in 1957's Sweet Smell of Success, a memorable movie full of purple chunks of dialogue that no actual person would ever speak—certainly no thick-necked New York City policeman on the take...
...You would be foolish to watch it on American Movie Classics if you wanted to know what life was really like back in the bad old 1950s...
...It is a very good melodrama, and you should go see it by all means...
...It was a clever decision by director Curtis Hanson to fill his three leading roles with journeymen actors, because their very anonymity (even Spacey's, despite the fact that he won a supporting-actor Oscar a few years ago) makes it possible for us to examine them clinically and come to our own conclusions about them...
...That sort of praise, which has been hurled at L.A...
...corrupt cops and gangsters and hookers and journalists on the loose in the 1950s that doesn't merely strain believability—it shreds believability for the sake of high-pitched melodrama...
...When six people are killed in a coffee shop late at night—among them White's ex-part-ner—a gigantic conspiracy slowly emerges involving higher-ups in the police department, a pornography-and-prostitution ring, and the development of the L.A...
...Russell Crowe is a particular revelation, delivering a performance as infinitely shaded in its way as Al Pacino's indelible breakthrough in The Godfather 25 years ago...
...Vincennes, who walks the streets of Los Angeles like he knows all, turns out to know absolutely nothing about the true workings of his city...
...Now, however, it would seem shocking, almost disturbing, to see a movie in which the system did work, and justice was done...
...And Exley, the incorruptible one, turns out to be the most morally ambiguous of all...
...The first is Jack Vin-cennes (Kevin Spacey), a glad-handing, sharp-dressed detective who works as the technical adviser on a TV cop show and moonlights by making busts that will be good fodder for a scandal sheet called Hush-Hush...
...What's most surprising about the movie is that the characters are not static, as we have come to expect from Hollywood police procedurals...
Vol. 3 • October 1997 • No. 4
