A Note To A Friend On A Second Look At LA Confidential

 Just saw it again for the first time since it first came out in 97.

Compelling, absorbing story.

I might pick at a few things though:

Russell Crowe doesn’t let me get inside him in any role he plays. There’s some quality in him, his acting, his natural demeanour, that limits my response to him, regardless of what character he plays. So different from say Denzel Washington who lets me get right inside whomever he plays. I mention him because of the two of them in American Gangster. 

Kim Basinger is an unsubtle actress and while good looking and ostensibly sexy, she doesn’t have the inner ability to radiate heat. 

Also, the ending which includes the ludicrous shoot out, the police department closing ranks, Exley coming out on top and Crowe and Kim Basinger “riding off” into happiness ever after is so “Hollywood.” 

As I watched it, I wondered if it could stand up to Scorsese’s better movies or to Chinatown. I concluded no: it doesn’t have the kinetic energy, the snap and crackle, of Scorsese’s movies. It seems to move along in a solid, sometimes stolid, quiet linear way.  But is it ever really enthralling? I don’t think so.

And it doesn’t have the mysterious blackness and moral ambiguity of Chinatown. Even as LA Confidential’s main characters, the three cops, change, evolve morally, the story line is even with all its twists and turns almost conventional: the corrupt Captain and his cop army finally brought to heel after a ludicrous shoot out, the police department then closing ranks to preserve its reputation and, as noted, “the guy and the girl” riding off into a happy ending. 

And while it’s called neo noir, my idiosyncratic notion of noir—pervasive and basically unremitting darkness—has me thinking it’s not that. Such darkness as the film portrays finds growing shafts of light till the end is relatively sunny. 

I guess the counter to that is the department’s hailing the Captain as a hero in the end and burying his evil. But I still say no though I’m open to rejoinder. 

Body Heat is my idea of true neo noir.