Very Hush-Hush: ”L.A. Confidential”

Los Angeles is a movie town, and so it’s not a surprise that the L.A. Conservancy, which since 1978 has been working to preserve the city’s architecture landmarks, has a special affection for old movie theatres. The Conservancy’s Last Remaining Seats celebration, held every year, allows Angelenos to enjoy a wide variety of classic films in vintage movie palaces. This spring you could see Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, Hitchcock’s thrilling North by Northwest, or a Mary Poppins family singalong, all in historic showplaces along Downtown L.A.’s Broadway. I recently trekked to 1931’s 2000-seat Los Angeles Theatre—where the French Baroque décor may be a bit shabby but still dazzles—to watch a very L.A. movie, 1997’s L.A. Confidential.

 The Conservancy has always spiced up its screenings with treats like brief stage performances, fashion shows featuring period-appropriate wardrobe, and special guests. For L.A. Confidential, the Conservancy brought in James Ellroy, author of the novel on which the film is based. Ellroy, born in L.A. in 1948, became famous as a writer of hard-boiled crime fiction. His focus on brutal crime is perhaps not surprising, because when he was ten years old his mother was raped and murdered. Her death gave him an obsessive interest in the Black Dahlia murder case, and his works of fiction, like The L.A. Quartet, cast a dark light on the city of his birth.

 The film version, effectively directed by Roger Corman alum Curtis Hanson, is perhaps less wild and crazy than Ellroy’s original, but Ellroy calls it “a proficient movie,” one that successfully taps into his own fascination with “bad men in love with strong women.” It also visually captures the L.A. of the 1950s, a time when dreams of happy families enjoying backyard barbecues are undercut by a city—and a police force—rife with crime. At the center of the film are three LAPD cops. “Hollywood Jack” Vincennes (a slick Kevin Spacey) lives to hobnob with celebrities on the set of a Dragnet-like TV crime show. Curiously, Hanson found two other key actors Down Under. Guy Pearce (coming off his role as a drag queen in Australia’s Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) plays Edmund Exley, a straight-arrow police sergeant who gradually succumbs to the moral ambiguity of those around him. By contrast, Russell Crowe’s Officer Bud White first seems to be a thug in cop’s clothing, but reveals a gentler side when he falls in love with a call girl who’s a Veronica Lake lookalike, played by a memorable Kim Basinger. (This was the film that essentially marked the start of Crowe’s distinguished American movie career.)  Danny Da Vito, David Straithairn, and James Cromwell also have key roles. If, back in 1997. you had just become aware of Cromwell as the kindly Farmer Arthur Hoggett in Babe, you would surely be surprised to see his turnabout here.

 L.A. Confidential is frank in its depiction of a town essentially run by racists, pimps, and drug dealers. So it’s no surprise that there will be blood—lots of it. No one we see on screen is entirely good, but there’s a sort of moral justice at work, and we come to care about those who manage to leave the City of the Angels for a better life elsewhere. That’s exactly what James Ellroy himself did. He now makes his home in Colorado.

 The film was nominated for 9 Oscars, including Best Picture, but won only two—for Basinger’s performance and the film’s adapted screenplay. After all, this was the year of Titanic.

                               French Baroque Ladies' Room 

                                Los Angeles Theatre (1931) 

 

Everything But the Bathroom Sink: “The Brutalist”

You can’t say that writer/director Brady Corbet lacks ambition. During the three hours and thirty-five minutes of screentime that make up The Brutalist, he shoehorns in such pressing topics as racial and ethnic bias, religious intolerance, drug addiction, sexual perversity, and what it feels like to be an artist in thrall to a wealthy businessman. I’d heard that The Brutalist is the story of a Holocaust survivor, and so it is. But for the Hungarian architect László Tóth, a proud product of Bauhaus training before Hitler came to power, America is not much of an improvement over Nazi Germany. In fact, the movie as a whole turns out to be an unrelieved diatribe against American life disguised as an immigrant saga.

Brutalism, as the film never gets around to explaining, is a school of design that became popular in the postwar years, one that features massive forms and heavy, raw materials like concrete. This is the style of the building project that dominates the film: Tóth’s design for an elaborate community center complete with library and chapel. The ideas are his (and a brief laudatory moment in the film’s epilogue finally makes clear to us how impressive they are). But the money comes from an impulsive and irascible tycoon who likes to be viewed (when it suits him) as a champion of modern art. He’s Harrison Lee Van Buren, and the name itself seems a ham-fisted way of reminding us that he’s American to the core. And, especially in a late-in-the-film scene where he’s truly—and unconvincingly—vicious to his protégé, he can be considered a brutalist too. 

The two main actors in this epic drama deserve praise. Adrien Brody, who won an Oscar back in 2002 for portraying a Polish Holocaust victim in The Pianist, is the ideal choice to play the long-suffering László. Tall and thin, with unkempt hair and a wild look in his eye, he seems about to cry even in moments when he’s genuinely happy. I was also impressed by Guy Pearce as the proud, mercurial rich man who holds László’s future in his hands. (I recall I first discovered Pearce, in a very different mood, as a drag queen in Australia’s 1994 hit, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.)  But in the key role of László’s wife, an invalid who is unable to reunite with her beloved spouse until the film is half over, the usually reliable Felicity Jones struck me as unconvincing. Her accent, for one thing, seems effortful. But she’s also been asked by the script to behave in ways that seem well outside the range of what’s possible for her. 

That’s my number-one problem with The Brutalist. The central characters in the film quite often behave not like human beings but like symbols I could cite many examples: moments of extreme love and extreme hate appear in the story not because they’re consistent with a character’s inner workings but because they make a point that the director (who’s also the writer) deems important. For instance, while I can understand László’s ardent natural sexuality coming to the fore at inappropriate times, what we see on screen always seems to be a message from Corbet to the viewer. 

My moviegoing companion— someone who shared my experience of this long, drawn-out, rather lugubrious story (thank heavens for that intermission!)—commented later that it was much more enjoyable to discuss the film afterwards than it was to sit through it. Yes, The Brutalist can’t be faulted for the strength of its ideas. But I couldn’t get past the clashing of all those symbols.