1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 64: L.A. Confidential

My “anchor” year is 1996, but now I’m casting a wider net. 1997 is well within what I consider to be a “golden” period of moviemaking – which, like other golden eras, hearkens back to previous ones. The English Patient (1996) hearkens back to David Lean; L.A. Confidential (1997) hearkens back to Chinatown, which itself hearkens to older crime dramas – the greatest of which, for me, is The Big Heat.

The Big Heat, Chinatown, L.A. Confidential. Three dramas about police or ex-police who have a special zeal for protecting women, and who end up hurting those women in one way or another.

That sounds as if the women were passive. They aren’t. Arguably, the most forceful and complex character in each of these movies is a woman. In L.A. Confidential, it’s Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger), a prostitute who specializes in reminding men of Veronica Lake; meanwhile, she loves those she is able to love.

But these movies are mainly about the men who try to save the women – foolishly, perhaps.

The “protector” in L.A. Confidential is Bud White (Russell Crowe). Rescuing domestic abuse victims and sex workers is his avocation. His temper often gets the better of him. His captain, Dudley Smith (James Cromwell), keeps him around to intimidate and beat confessions out of criminals. This is the 1950s. Los Angeles is growing. Mobsters from out of town try to move in, but the police keep them in check.

It’s the corrupt local bigwigs, cloaked in respectability, accumulating wealth and power in tandem with the city, who run the scene.

Bud seems like a brute, but he’s smart. He follows leads and quietly makes progress on tricky cases. The movie also follows two other smart police officers. Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) is running a side-hustle, sharing information with the tabloids. They get the scoops; he gets the collars and the publicity. Edmund Exley (Guy Pearce) is a careerist “boy scout” – upright but ruthless, and loyal to none but himself. His colleagues initially doubt that he has the stomach to perform the necessary brutalities. By the end, he’s laid out more bodies than anyone else.

The death toll is high, what with one mass murder, a few gunfights, and many assassinations. There are a lot of beatings, too, and an off-camera rape. People speak nastily enough to make each other cry. All of this taxes and ennervates the viewer. The movie isn’t shy about how morally compromised, even downright awful, these police are; but it revels in the exhibition. It invites the viewer to share in the thrill of pumping a shotgun or getting an interrogee to squirm. More than Chinatown, in which the spectacle descends into tragedy and then sordidness, or The Big Heat, which seethes with irony, L.A. Confidential helps us to understand the visceral attraction of policing that mixes sadism, cynicism, and self-righteousness.

Each protagonist is asked why he became a cop. Jack Vincennes can’t remember. Edmund Exley wants to catch the guys who don’t get caught: in other words, he wants to outsmart people. The hotheaded Bud White, the noblest of the three, simply responds to woundedness, inflicting it upon the wounders and rescuing the wounded. He breaks the most rules – while following orders, as often as not – but he takes the job more seriously than the others do. He also relishes it the least.

The best line is uttered by Lynn Bracken when she says goodbye to Exley, who has just climbed a few more rungs up the ladder: “Some men get the world. Others get ex-hookers and a trip to Arizona.” Ex-hookers and Arizona is the better choice.

I don’t know how closely this movie resembles real policing. I just have other movies to compare it to.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 22: The English patient

There was an unconventional Hungarian aristocrat named László Almásy who explored the Sahara in the 1930s. He had love affairs and died before he was old, but not in the spectacular fashion of Count Almásy of The English Patient.

The fictional Almásy (Ralph Fiennes) finds himself rolling across the desert in a (proto-) jeep with young Mrs. Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas). She is talkative. He is quiet. She asks: How does a count make his way from the castle to the desert? Almásy replies:

I once traveled with a guide who was taking me to Faya. He didn’t speak for nine hours. At the end of it, he pointed at the horizon and said, “Faya.” That was a good day.

His answer is evasive. He already is in love with Katharine, whose husband is assisting him with his geographic expedition.

Almásy does what he can to keep himself at arm’s length from Katharine. Then they are caught in a sandstorm. It gathers quietly in the distance, obscuring the stars. Minutes later, Almásy and Katharine are forced to shelter together for the night while the sand beats against the jeep’s windows.

It is too much for Almásy. He strokes Katharine’s hair.

ALMÁSY: “Let me tell you about winds. There is a whirlwind from southern Morrocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. And there is the ghibli, from Tunis …”

KATHARINE: “The ghibli !!!”

ALMÁSY: “The ghibli, which rolls and rolls and rolls and produces a rather strange nervous condition. And then there is the harmattan, a red wind, which mariners call the Sea of Darkness. And red sand from this wind has flown as far as the south coast of England, apparently producing showers so dense that they were mistaken for blood.”

KATHARINE: “Fiction! We have a house on that coast and it has never, never rained blood.”

ALMÁSY: “No, it’s all true. Herodotus, your friend. He writes about it. And he writes about a wind, the simoon, which a nation thought was so evil they declared war on it and marched out against it. In full battle dress. Their swords raised.”

There are scenes of such poetry all through The English Patient. Some of it is verbal; much is visual. The desert is a frequent backdrop. It is likened in different scenes to a human body, to a rumpled bedsheet, a slab of rock, a strip of parchment. As Shine is obsessed with the different appearances and meanings of drops of water, The English Patient showcases sand dunes and grains of sand.

Like Shine, again, The English Patient shifts backward and forward through time. Almásy’s moments with Katharine are deathbed recollections. He has been severely burned, and his lungs are failing. Mistaken for an Englishman, he is in Italy at the close of the Second World War, being cared for in an abandoned villa by Hana (Juliette Binoche), a French-Canadian nurse who has dropped out of her British military convoy to see this patient through his last days. Hana’s lover has just been killed; in Almásy, she recognizes a person similarly bereaved. She asks for his memories, which he divulges intermittently – as they return to him – or perhaps as he chooses to let others know them.

The villa gathers more occupants. Two are bomb disposal experts (the land is littered with mines). Another (Willem Dafoe) is a shadowy figure who calls himself Caravaggio. He, too, urges Almásy to recollect his past.

It is an international group, most of whose members are Britons in name only. Just one of the bomb disposers is fully English. The other (Naveen Andrews) is from India. He serves his colonizer with a certain wariness. Hana is more French than British. Caravaggio, ostensibly another Canadian, turns out to have spent most of his life in North Africa. Almásy, of course, is not an Englishman at all but has merely been taken for one. (In other circumstances, he has been taken for a German – no small matter during the Second World War.) Almásy himself hates the idea that countries claim ownership over land and people. It becomes clear why he might have chosen to leave his castle for an unmarked, largely ignored patch of desert.

This is an extraordinarily rich movie, splashing romance and history over startlingly scenic canvases. At one pole of the story is Hana, Almásy’s nurse, who freely gives of herself (in her first scene, she kisses a wounded soldier just because he asks her to). The other polar character is Almásy, who hates the idea of ownership, of being owned by others. It might more cynically be put that he believes in his absolute ownership of himself. What has been said of John Locke (by D.A. Lloyd Thomas) might also be said of Almásy: he is

perhaps one of those people who wish to protect a private place from everyone else. He [is] jealous of his independence and autonomy, and not only intellectually committed to the doctrine that persons own themselves.

The English Patient is one of the best artistic studies of this type of person. It is one of the very best movies in a good year.