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. 9: Mulholland Falls

Note: Please read the updates to the previous entry if you haven’t already done so.

And now, this month’s movie review.

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Assembled into a whole, Mulholland Falls is nothing special, but some of its parts are compelling, even poetic. In its best passages, the movie resembles Night Moves (1975). Both movies are about tough but thoroughly urbanized detectives who are lured away from Los Angeles into weird tracts of wilderness.

(The same is arguably true of Chinatown. In that movie, however, the plot’s spiritual center remains in Los Angeles. In Mulholland Falls and Night Moves, the spiritual center is out in the middle of nowhere.)

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The worst scenes of Mulholland Falls wallow in domesticity. Melanie Griffith – memorable for her portrayal of a teenaged runaway in Night Moves – is cast in Mulholland Falls as the wife of the main detective, played by Nick Nolte. Her role is to be sinless (though she does smoke). This is not what Griffith excels at. One wonders if she was included simply because of her association with the earlier movie.

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A slightly more interesting female character is the murder victim, played by Jennifer Connelly. She is revealed, in a series of flashbacks, to have been a warm-hearted prostitute. As the main story begins, her crushed body is discovered in a field where a new housing development is being built. Most of her bones have been broken. Her limbs are jelly-like.

This is the first interesting development. Why is this corpse in such an unusual state?

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Investigating the Connelly character’s murder, four detectives of the L.A.P.D. follow a lead out into the desert. They arrive at a test site for atomic bombs.

The landscape has certain bizarre features. Its keepers, military minions, exhibit even bizarrer behavior.

The strangest person of all is their leader, General Timms, played by John Malkovich. This actor – often, in my view, miscast – is perfectly suited for his role in Mulholland Falls. His quaint flamboyance is disconcertingly out of step with the clean-cut conventionality of his subordinates.

People are mostly empty space, he tells the Nolte character. Only the oddities of physics keep them from falling through the floor.

Nolte’s detective has little use for this point of view. He recalls the dead woman: all too solid, with crushed bones.

And yet there is something ephemeral about their mission. In one scene out in the desert, the Nolte character and his fellow detectives stand on the edge of an enormous hole. Here, evidently, the ground has disappeared.

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In another scene, the detectives sit inside a beach house, guarding a suspect. They’re unnerved by the rhythm of the ocean waves. They’d be comforted to hear traffic noises instead.

Suddenly, an officer keels over, dead. Solid bullets rip through walls that have been providing merely illusory protection. The detectives engage in a gunfight with unseen foe. When the dust settles, their suspect has disappeared, as if into thin air.

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In such movies as these, there’s usually just one detective: a knight-errant. In this movie, the four detectives stick together. This benefits certain scenes. When the detectives look down into the gaping hole in the desert, it’s better that there are several of them to comment on it; they’re like a questing fellowship or a party of explorers. But in other scenes, the surplus of detectives is distracting.

Historically, mid-century Los Angeles was protected by a special police posse, the Hat Squad, that used strongarm tactics to discourage organized criminals from operating in that city. (Such policing would be depicted with considerably sharper focus one year later, in the great L.A. Confidential.) One of the ironies of Mulholland Falls is that the practitioners of strongarm tactics are themselves subjected to them outside of their own jurisdictions.

There are other tantalizing hints about the operations of the L.A.P.D. The detectives’ slimy boss, the always watchable Bruce Dern, appears for one glorious little scene. I wish the movie had given him a larger part. But so it goes with Mulholland Falls. There are some fine elements, but they aren’t woven together into a satisfying whole.

The same is true of the movie’s score, composed by Dave Grusin (whom I admire for composing the score for Lucas). Some of its passages are not very good, and the whole is a bit of a mess. But certain parts of it are lovely.