James Ellroy's
response to director Curtis Hanson, having read the screenplay Hanson and his
co-screenwriter Brian Helgeland - who also scripted the pleasing if superficial Conspiracy
Theory - had culled from Ellroy's dense urban epic, LA Confidential.
The screenplay took a year and seven drafts to complete to the relative satisfaction of
Hanson and Helgeland. Ellroy liked what he read, although recognising that what was to be
filmed was going to be a very different artefact from his doorstep of a book. To the
delight - and doubtless relief - of the filmmakers, Ellroy fully endorsed the movie when
it was released. The screenwriters had allegedly striven to preserve Ellroy's 'voice' in their massive task of adapting the five-hundred page novel. Did they succeed? Not really, and their supposed endeavour was perhaps merely lip-service. The movie hasn't a lot to do with Ellroy except in the skeletal sense of utilizing his raw material and turns out to be a conventional Hollywood cop movie. Set in the LA of the early fifties, LA Confidential is a diverting movie with good performances, but fails to make your palms itch in the way that great pictures do. Despite the publicity hype and some nice words from the critics, this is a cold and deeply cynical movie, an unemotional watered-down version of the fevered escapades drawn from Ellroy's constipated narrative. Even with Jerry Goldsmith's similarly haunting Chinatownesque music on LA Confidential's soundtrack, the movie cannot be equated with those other two great LA pictures - Howard Hawkes' The Big Sleep and Roman Polanski's Chinatown.
Curtis Hanson is a middlebrow Hollywood director of no particular distinction. He just happened to have clout, based upon a couple of dubious box office successes. He made a sub-Hitchcockian psychological thriller, The Bedroom Window, the vacuous Bad Influence, the successful but imitative The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, and the utterly risible The River Wild, a shameless rip-off of John Boorman's masterpiece, Deliverance. Ellroy's novel required a dangerous director of the stature of the late Sam Fuller. Hiring Hanson was a bit like asking Michael Winner to direct Taxi Driver.
The main failure of the movie is to fail to find any visual equivalent of Ellroy's stream-of-consciousness prose. Ellroy's indiscriminate mix of fact and fiction in his giddy 'secret history' of Los Angeles gives his books a voyeuristic interest - one he clearly participates in and encourages in the reader - but little in the way of historical or social perspective. The packed plot, dense backstories, crossovers and interconnections between characters and incidents, all stirred together with a caustic stream-of consciousness oozing with gaudy vernacular, fast-paced but indigestible, circles like a rickety Catherine-wheel at a shiny-shoddy fairground. Sometimes the ride is exhilarating, more often than not tedious. The continual flood of words congeal like suet until you simply want out. Ellroy writes about the bad guys and succeeds in making them as boring as they surely are in life. This writer is a realist, after all.
How does a movie recreate Ellroy's frenetic, deeply pedantic prose style? It doesn't if it is made in Hollywood - that kind of adventurousness, threatening to confuse the audience and inhibit the box office take - would not be permitted. In order to emulate Ellroy a director would have to adopt more of a documentary approach and embrace one of the dramatised-documentary's principal rules: what people are is more important that who they are. There are no real characters in Ellroy's books, simply functionaries with intensely detailed personal histories, role-players in a violent saga of intertwined events. Ellroy's novels even read like documentaries - his prose swings and swirls like a confused newscamera covering an assassination in a public place. The plotty details of the narratives resemble a documentary researcher's raw observational notes - most of which won't get into the programme. Unfortunately they get into Ellroy's books, all of them. The cinema-verite technique would most appropriately reflect the simulated panache of Ellroy's prose, give events dynamic and sufficient speed to cover the detail, and allow the people in the story just to be there, to be observed as figures in a cityscape, rather than to pretend, as LA Confidential pretentiously does, that they are characters drawn in any real depth.
Unhappily the movie got caught trying to do two things at once: evoke the ethos of the bestseller and hijack its following for the film, whilst trying to supply a cinematic experience that would be good box office and provide its director with long-awaited BFI accredited auteur status. to achieve anything the movie needed to look and sound like an American underworld version of Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, which was shot in black-and-white in a grainy documentary style and, sustaining no main protagonists and utilizing a huge cast of non-professional actors, presented audiences with the concept of the Algerian people as the film's main character in a real story from history, not a half-faked one - the erstwhile struggle of FLN terrorists to obtain self-determination for Algeria from the French. The broad story canvas, a restless camera-eye, actors who are real people drawn from the situation and not from Central Casting, a narrative which interweaves swiftly between shorthand situations, a spiralling sense of history: these elements would have brought innovative density to Ellroy's sprawling, log-jammed design. This needed to be a big movie, thundering like a volcano. However, The Battle of Algiers approach would have gone down like a cup of cold sick in Tinsel Town.
Hanson attempts to reproduce the sleazeball Ellroy elan in an appropriately tacky opening title sequence, which ably catches the swimming pool glitz and sycophancy of LA, its emptiness and philistinism. Initially the film adopts the technique of employing newspaper and magazine reports, radio and television newscasts as part of the tapestry of the film in order to pace up the narrative and echo the novel's style. Danny DeVito is subjected to hackneyed casting as Sid Hudgens, a tabloid gossip columnist on a LA sleazesheet called Hush Hush. Hudgens role in the film is more significant than in the book by virtue of his voice-over narrator's role, even though this is a transparent dramatic device to expedite narrative range and pace. Documentary-type captions are also used to establish the main characters. Then, as the movie unfolds, so it slows in pace and grows increasingly conventional, becoming little more than a routine police procedural, with some salacious sequences thrown in on the pretext of offering a supposed critique of police corruption and machiavellian city hall politics.
Yet is any of this new? There have been numerous movies depicting police corruption and dehumanisation, including Mike Figgis's powerfully disturbing doppelganger policier, Internal Affairs, Abel Ferrara's obnoxiously realistic Bad Lieutenant, and the John Hopkins scripted Sidney Lumet movie, The Offence, based upon Hopkins' hit Royal Court stage play, This Story of Yours. And there is also James B Harris's Cop, starring James Woods as a psychotic LAPD detective hunting - who else? - a serial killer, the story adapted from Ellroy's highly conventional second novel, published in 1984, Blood on the Moon. In Ellroy's somewhat self-congratulatory 1996 interview with Paul Duncan published in The Third Degree, (No Exit Press, 1996), Ellroy is surprisingly dismissive of Raymond Chandler, whom he repeatedly slags off during the lengthy and at times boorish interview.
Of course, Chandler achieved a number of things in his seven groundbreaking novels which must be of some irritation to Ellroy and his immense ego. Chandler wrote about police corruption and brutality in the thirties, forties and fifties - when it wasn't fashionable and soft-target to do so - long before Ellroy arrived on the crime-writing scene. Philip Marlowe's creator wrote ferocious attacks upon American society - with a wit, humour and panache totally beyond Ellroy. Explosions of extraordinary venom towards law enforcement and city hall graft are to be found in such Chandler novels as Farewell, My Lovely, The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister and The Long Goodbye. Some of Chandler's descriptive imagery of the dereliction and poverty of the LA of the period exude an anger, bleakness and despair unequalled by Ellroy and most chroniclers of the American city.
Chandler invented the concept of the crime novelist as social commentator with his fearsome critiques of social and political mores at a time when the crime novel was barely taken seriously, especially in America. Now the hardboiled crime novel is fashionable and critically respectable, so that the fruits of Chandler's pioneering work in enabling crime genres to be considered works of art rather than merely craft can be enjoyed by Ellroy and others able to benefit from what must have been lonely and deeply frustrating neglect for many unsung crime writers in the postwar years. Since then, partly through the inheritance of Chandler's achievement, there has been a sea-change in our culture, which has almost reversed priorities: it will no longer do for the hardboiled crime writer simply to tell a straight forward, unaffected story - there must be a sociological or psychological agenda to the narrative as well. It's uncool to be simply an entertainer, hip to be a mirror of society.
Much has been claimed for the power of Ellroy's language and the powerful beat and rhythm it projects in the reader's mind, what Ellroy calls his 'frenetic fever dreams.' But a lot of Ellroy's language, like his narratives, is constructed on sand. The stream-of-consciousness vernacular sounds good and tough, lean and mean, but when you examine it a bit closer, isn't it all a bit purple? Do those glittery ten-dollar words actually mean anything? The sentences and paragraphs flow along on the page, sounding authentic and streetcred, but after awhile become much of a muchness, just too many words taking up too many pages in too many books. There is a showy ostentatiousness to the prose, an inability or unwillingness to write in straight, uncluttered English. Everything has to be hyperboled into monotonous obscure street slang, making many of the books hard labour to read, especially when the plots are also incomprehensible. Ellroy's language is flowery, a term usually reserved for ornate adjective-driven English, but here applying also to self-indulgent mean streets gymnasts too.
Ellroy uses the same sleight-of-hand of language as Irvine Welsh with his novel, Trainspotting, certain episodes from which were cannibalised from earlier small press writings. Welch is a far superior writer to Ellroy in every way, yet the intense Scottish vernacular he wrote his first and most famous novel in forces the reader to learn Welsh's language in order to understand the content of his novel. This achieved after a few chapters of struggle, the reader smugly devours the remainder of the novel, having mastered and become appropriately hooked by the language in a narrative concerning drug addiction. A clever ploy: certainly Trainspotting is a brilliant literary conjuring trick, but it is still a trick, not genuinely creative art. It is noticeable, for instance, that when Welsh wishes to press a particular profundity upon the reader, then suddenly the vernacular that the rest of the novel is sustained by virtually disappears: Welsh is clearly anxious that his discerning insights should be communicated unsullied by translation difficulties, especially to metropolitan book-reviewers.
Ellroy similarly, if less successfully, dresses up his prose in the King's New Clothes. Yet there is a hardness and vulgarity to Ellroy's language which is mildly threatening, daring the reader to dislike - or even question - what is on the page. A violent switchback of words and actions which browbeats and harasses the reader into accepting the truth of this fiction, that this is the real thing, the unchallenged record coined in the authentic language of the street. The movie also participates in this bullish pressure upon the cinemagoer, borrowing from Ellroy the nuances of a narrative which seems torn from the headlines, but which only exploits contemporary events for its own sensationalist purposes. This mildly insidious air of heisted approval is echoed in the language of Ellroy's novels, with its over-charged rhetoric, snarling vernacular and breathless rollercoaster of one-dimensional incident. Ellroy tries too hard to be the 'laureate of bad men,' in his own pompous phrase.
The problem for Ellroy as a major innovator of the American language is that Chandler was there first and did it better. Chandler believed in the American language and its ability to summon up that feeling of 'the land beyond the hill' which he felt was missing from the work of Dashiell Hammett, his illustrious forebear in the hardboiled stakes. In his interview with Paul Duncan, Ellroy indulges in that wretchedly redundent game of comparison between the work of Chandler and Hammett. The only factor connecting Chandler and Hammett is that they both wrote hardboiled thrillers, and that's about it. Each had their own unique vision of the world which enriches us in different ways, producing experiences and perspectives which are equally valuable. It doesn't have to be either Chandler or Hammett, but both. Ellroy reckons that a lot of Chandler's writing is 'flat-out bad,' but then he doesn't rate Dostoyevsky either, Crime and Punishment being 'drearily written.' So what chance does an old Black Mask writer have?
But Chandler did something through the language of his novels that very few novelists have been able. Through his powerful sense of place he was able to create Los Angeles and its world in his fiction. Not an especially attractive place, but one which, alongside Philip Marlowe, became a central character in the books and stories. We have Dickens's London, Simenon's Paris, and Chandler's Los Angeles. James Ellroy's Los Angeles is not on the map. W H Auden described Chandler as 'the poet of Los Angeles,' and Chandler really knew his LA from a time when Hollywood 'was a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line.' He gradually watched the city become a 'neon-lit slum' and described the 'papercup personality' of an increasingly seedy, depersonalised environment in vivid, intensely visual snapshot moments.
That is the vital element missing from LA Confidential, both the book and film. Los Angeles. The place, any sense of it, the look of it, the feel of it, the smell of it. In Chandler, the city vibrates off the page. In Ellroy, we could be anywhere. No atmosphere, no mood, no personality of the city. The movie, adapted from the third of Ellroy's so-called 'LA Quartet' of interconnected novels, which also comprise of The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere and White Jazz, therefore locates its centre upon the characters and
increasingly focuses upon them as
the film develops. This accounts for much of the emptiness of the picture, a vacuum
inevitably emanating from Ellroy. 'LA is one of the main characters in this movie,' states
its director, but the city is missing from the screen in any meaningful atmospheric sense
in the way that Chinatown evoked LA in every frame, enhanced by Jerry
Goldsmith's score. In LA Confidential, Goldsmith's score seems to belong to another -
better - film. The problem with the movie's pragmatic reliance upon the trio of police characters is that they are not very interesting people. The interwoven stories of three cops - Bud White, Ed Exley, Jack Vincennes, played by Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce and, our old friend from the deeply flawed Se7en and equally flawed The Usual Suspects, Kevin Spacey - come across as a rerun of an inferior episode of Hill Street Blues. There is no centre to our concern about these characters, no reason why we should attach ourselves to them. The corrosive cynicism of the novel has been considerably watered down, of course, and its five hundred pages filleted so that much of Ellroy's plotty backstories disappear or are supplanted. Exley's father Preston, for instance, is an important character in the novel and Exley's own backstory provides an irony and ambiguity to the narrative, all of which has been cut in the film, reducing Exley to a mealy-mouthed caricature. And the Kim Basinger love-interest with Bud White is particularly thin, weakly motivated and acted, with Basinger playing a Veronica Lake lookalike callgirl, another symbolic allusion to Ellroy's murdered mother.
The most interesting and credible character in the film is Police Captain Dudley Smith, unnervingly played with lethal cool by the avuncular James Cromwell. Smith's initial appearance in Ellroy's work was outside the LA Quartet - Smith was introduced in Ellroy's first novel, Clandestine, published in 1982 when the author was thirty-one. In the movie, Smith takes over much of the role fulfilled by Preston Exley in the novel, and even provides the movie with its Hollywood ending, when Ed Exley shoots him in the back. We knew all along that the ferret-faced Exley would do the right thing.
This is quite a violent film, yet the violence has very little impact. There is so much of it that it seems like sending coal to Newcastle, and we are offered none of the discomfort and disturbing ambiguity of Quentin Tarantino's movies, even though Ellroy describes Tarantino as a 'fatuous child' and Reservoir Dogs 'garbage.' Interestingly, Tarantino and his mentor Elmore Leonard share similar territory to Ellroy in their interest in lowlife characters who appear to have no redeeming features, yet whom we are finally drawn to see in more complex human terms. Yet again knocking Raymond Chandler and the 'cheap liberalism' of Chandler's famous manifesto for the fictional private eye 'Down These Mean Streets A Man Must Go,' Ellroy prefers, as again quoted in his interview with Paul Duncan: 'Men who are often toadies of right wing regimes. Men who are racists. Men who are homophobes. These are my guys. These are the guys that I embrace. These are the guys that I empathise with. These are the guys that I love.'
This is Ellroy's world of 'bad white men,' whom he describes as 'multi-faceted human beings.' Ellroy is entitled to his proclivities, but his liking for the mercenary and the carpetbagger accounts for the failure of LA Confidential as a movie, for there is no interest in
characters upon which the film rides. They merely
represent the lowest expectations of human experience and their elevation in Ellroy's
fiction is spuriously explained by him in terms of historical reality, when the real
interest is in muckraking. However romanticised, even Chandler's disenchanted loner
private eye - the flawed antihero in a grubby undershirt - does not relish as Ellroy
appears to the dark potential in people but, however disenchanted, hopes for a world where
real trust can exist, even in Marlowe's 'half-lit world, where always the wrong things
happen, but never the right.' Besides which, the rehabilitation of morally repellent characters into personas with whom we can share a love-hate relationship is, again, hardly new, however much Ellroy may like to claim it for his own. Morally ambiguous characterisation has been the stuff of fiction, drama and poetry for centuries. Furthermore, a far greater contemporary influence than Ellroy upon the urban thriller, from Mean Streets onwards, who has made it his business to show us the ugliness and yet also the humanity of violent, trashcan characters, is Martin Scorsese who, predictably, Ellroy rubbishes alongside Tarantino. But in the characters played by Robert De Niro and, especially, Joe Pesci, in movies such as GoodFellas and Casino, Scorsese extracts from his audiences a complexity of response to these disturbed and disturbing personas with a veracity to which James Ellroy, for all his pretensions, can only aspire.