L.A. Town

by Sean Cameron

When the police thriller L.A. Confidential opened several weeks ago, I was stunned by gushing critics who inevitably compared the film favorably to 1974's Chinatown. The prospect of a new detective picture reaching such greatness struck me as both exciting and troubling. Detective flicks seem to have been stuck in a rut of late, adhering either to the buddy-cop shoot-'em-up formula or the stale serious-serial killer type influenced by The Silence of the Lambs, and I gladly welcomed the chance for a revival of the genre. Still, I thought, how could Curtis Hanson, the director of the tepid Hand That Rocks the Cradle and River Wild possibly make a film that could stack up against Roman Polanski's masterpiece?

After screening both films, I decided that it is unfair to compare the two. While they share a locale, inspired acting, brilliant scripts with witty dialogue, and dense plot structures, the films have very different purposes to attend to and entertain in divergent ways.

While neither of these films can be adequately summed up in this space, they each deal with the systems of power running the city of Los Angeles. Chinatown takes place in the 30s and traces the origins of the desert city's most needed resource: water. Jack Nicholson's private detective Jake Gittes stumbles upon a massive operation headed by Noah Cross (John Huston) to seize control of L.A.'s water supply by redirecting it from the valley, allowing him to buy up the failing lands of the orange growers. This is only one part of a plot involving Cross's daughter Evelyn (Faye Dunaway), her murdered husband, his alleged mistress, Evelyn's romance with Jake, and Cross's shady family past. The glitzy 1950s provide the setting for L.A. Confidential, a town bursting with celebrities, police corruption, high-class prostitution rings, and drugs. It's when these elements all come together after a gruesome murder that ambitious straight arrow Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) and aggressive palooka Bud White (Russell Crowe) begin to peel away the layers of immorality to reveal the black center of L.A.'s political machine. Each film possesses an admirable complexity which demands that the audience pay close attention, for the respective mysteries do not simply reveal themselves at the end, and the inattentive viewer will be left in a state of unfortunate confusion.

Both pictures also exude the film noir style of the classic detective films of 30s and 40s Hollywood. Chinatown is pure noir, while L.A. Confidential smartly adapts the trappings of the form. While both films have darkness to spare, employ the most evil of heavys and beautiful of femmes fatales, it is Chinatown which plunges headlong into the abyss. This can be attributed to the time period in which each film was made. Chinatown is a product of the post-Watergate 70s, in which even the most reputable of systems was revealed to be teeming with corruption and crooks. The hope and innocence of L.A. and the players of Chinatown were shattered just as those of an entire nation. The dark secrets of the Cross family reached back so far as to be beyond repair; the film mirrored the nihilism of American society. L.A. Confidential is very much a product of the 90s, a crossing of old Hollywood style with the new detachment. Its audience has been ingrained with a distrust of systems; so the corruption itself is not so much the focus as the who-done-it and why. There is also a 90s kind of excitement about it, from Tarantinoesque gun battles in which White and Exley (somehow) take on the entire detective corps of the LAPD to the lightening quick dialogue. L.A. Confidential is fast where Chinatown broods.

Their respective use of noir conventions reveals another fundamental difference between the films. L.A. Confidential is an Old Hollywood movie updated for a 90s crowd. The violence is more intense and realistic, the distrust of systems amplified, and the dialogue less stilted, but the inevitable happy ending is on the way. The good guy gets the girl, though the romance requires a suspension of disbelief (cop and call girl), the bad guys get theirs, and all seems, if not completely fixed, a whole lot better. This is L.A. Confidential's primary detriment -- for a film so complex and enjoyably menacing throughout, everything seems a bit too OK at the conclusion. Chinatown, however, is Old Hollywood reimagined -- all the characters and situations are there, but director Polanski twists and distorts them beyond recognition. What begins as a homage to noir becomes something completely new and much more dark. The hero is left crushed at the end, his hopes dashed as the evil forces he fights against win out and tighten their suffocating grip on L.A. Here, the revelation of the mystery is not as powerful as the inevitable yet shocking culmination of the film's themes.

The strength of each film lies in the screenplay, both of which employ symbols and metaphors ranging from wildly effective to brilliant. L.A. Confidential portrays Los Angeles as a city of shiny veneer which masks a seedy underworld; the theme of disguise marks the characters and the police institution. Writers Brian Helgeland and Hanson also provide a great plot device in the character of Rollie Tomassie, who functions similarly to The Usual Suspects's Keyser Soze. In a heart-stopping sequence, Exley discovers how the various crimes are linked simply by the mention of his name. Robert Towne's ingenious script for Chinatown employs the title region as a metaphor for hopelessness, dread, and confusion where good never triumphs. This is hinted to throughout the film, as Gittes refers back to his old job as a cop in Chinatown to illustrate the various confounding situations, though his reasons why do not become clear until the end. No scenes in the film take place in Chinatown until the shattering conclusion, when all the characters convene in the street and meet their bleak fates. The occurrence of incest and water pilfering also relates to the theme, as all that is good and natural is manipulated by powerful and deranged hands. The thematic unity of the script and film is flawless, for it never bends to convention as L.A. Confidential does.

L.A. Confidential is certainly dazzling entertainment, providing the thrills of a blockbuster without compromising complexity. Like the movies of Hollywood's Golden Age, it is exciting and smart. And while it cannot match the artistry and greatness of Chinatown, the comparison of the two is largely unwarranted. See L.A. Confidential for the renewal of the detective film, but see Chinatown for its pinnacle.