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The secret's out
by CarlosC (movies profile)
Aug 25, 2007
10
of
12 people found this review helpful
In the widely-acclaimed 1997 Curtis Hanson film, L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, and Guy Pearce play three young, career-minded cops in the rough-and-tumble world of the 1940s LAPD.
The movie centers first around the investigation of a gangland-styled massacre for which three African American rapists get the rap, and a goodie-goodie cop (Pearce) gets a medal. This early part of the film also traces Pearce's battle against police corruption -- a systemic plague that seeps into every level of police activity; from the youngest rank-and-file up to the chief of police. Later in the film, the tidy convictions of that massacre begin to unravel as the three head-strong cops investigate a Hollywood porn-and-prostitution rink. Kevin Spacey is the police consultant to a DRAGNET-styled television cop-show, and Danny DeVito the writer for a tabloid paper that thrives on staged raids, whose beats often cross-over too intimately with those of the cops it covers.
It is a complex plot that gathers on many fronts, but, in the end, it all goes to the same issue: Can anyone do the right thing in an atmosphere so clouded by graft? The police force depicted is a dog chasing its tail; whose cops often investigate leads that other policemen are diligently trying to bury. And, the officers's own m.o.'s often clash and interfere with their ability to do their jobs. But, these cops are not two-dimensional thugs. L.A. CONFIDENTIAL crafts a big picture in which we see the best of intentions -- for instance, those of the Pearce character -- taken hostage by a runaway train; the department's image, as projected by the L.A. media (then, as now, the most powerful image-making machine in the universe).
It is easy to see that the clean-cut, dimple-in-the-cheek goodness of the fifties TV shows was a transparent attempt at propaganda that served the purpose of municipal establishment power and the PD's PR. The film takes that image and establishes it as the party-line for a police force that was expected to uphold that image at all costs; even if it compromised their ability to uphold the law, civil liberties, or any other inconvenience that might get in the way. The whole city was operating in like manner. It was so desperate to live up to its postcard image that it threw almost everything else by the wayside to pursue it.
As a period-piece, L.A. CONFIDENTIAL is masterful, using a wide variety of locations to show that the past is out there, and previewing contemporary issues that are the residual evidence of the movie's central themes: The corrupting effect of Hollywood power, racism, police corruption, the mob, irresponsible journalism, and the dawn of the television era, just to name a few. L.A. CONFIDENTIAL was the best movie of 1997.
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