The moment when Bud and Ed team up

I watched L.A. Confidential for the first time in about nine years last night. It's a great film whose greatness I came to fully appreciate on my last viewing in 2012. Last night's viewing was just on a whim, just as a treat. 

Back in those days when I considered L.A. Confidential to function primarily as a rival for my favorite film of 1997, Titanic, whose attention from the critics made me vicariously jealous, I kind of didn't think it was all that. Oh, I clearly liked it -- you don't rank a film #12 for the year if you don't really like it -- but I resented its acclaim, because I felt that many of those same critics really didn't see the value in Titanic, and I imagined they were attacking my intellect and my tastes by bashing the James Cameron movie.

Titanic is still ranked higher on my Flickchart, but L.A. Confidential regularly gains ground in my estimation.

The thing I always forget about L.A. Confidential is how much of an entertainment it is, first and foremost. Since it was such a critical darling, I tend to think that it must be deep, or artsy, or Important. L.A. Confidential is not really any of those things. It doesn't need to be. It's just a crackerjack Hollywood crime story full of charismatic performers and great twists. Okay, not twists by the standards M. Night Shyamalan would establish a couple years later, but good narrative twists and turns that made you feel like you were on a amusement park ride, having the time of your life.

One of the simple, gut-level pleasures of L.A. Confidential is the moment our two heroes, who approach police work in polar opposite ways and are at each others' throats for much of the story, finally team up to get The Bad Guys. "Bad guys" is certainly a term of great relativity in L.A. Confidential, as many of the "good guys" are venal and compromised, and even the morally upright one has a pole up his ass and seems to go too far in the other direction, making him vaguely disagreeable as well.

But after a good hour and 45 minutes of gray areas, the movie does reduce things to good guys and bad guys, and it's that moment when Bud White (Russell Crowe) and Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) finally realize they are working toward the same goals. Which is to take down the REAL bad guys.

The ensuing scenes between Ed and Bud are filled with such hopeful testosterone that you can't help but be swept up in them. You might almost call their new bond homoerotic, if you didn't see how drawn they both were to Kim Basinger.

As these guys enter rooms with guns drawn, almost engaging in that back-to-back dance of gunmen fighting off a circle of foes, throwing bullet clips and car keys to each other, it's like a well-oiled machine driven by a righteous purpose. The throwing of objects to one another especially captures their unified energy. You can't play catch with someone unless you like them, and you can't perfectly aim a projectile toward the other's hand, barely having even to announce your intention first, unless your minds are perfectly in sync.

And when they're holed up in the Victory Hotel, throwing mattresses and bureaus in front of the windows to block incoming gunfire, picking off corrupt cops with shotguns and pistols, it's invigorating as hell.

Another day I can tell you all the other great things about L.A. Confidential -- and how I watched the movie without gagging over Kevin Spacey's involvement -- but today I just want to talk about Bud and Ed.

Remembering a skilled tradesman

Curtis Hanson made two films that I cherish in 1997's L.A. Confidential and 2000's Wonder Boys. But those aren't really the films I think of when I think of Hanson, and they aren't what I'm remembering today, the day after he died at 71 of what was believed to be a heart attack.

L.A. Confidential and Wonder Boys are auteur type projects, projects suggesting a particular vision on the part of their directors. The more interesting proof of his abilities -- to me, anyway -- was his two very above average director-for-hire projects, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and The River Wild.

Conveniently, we adopt and abandon the auteur theory as we see fit, calling certain directors intrinsic parts of certain films while saying they had little to do with the creative spark behind others. In truth, Hanson was credited as at least co-writer on both good movies (L.A. Confidential) and bad ones (Lucky You). But when it comes to Cradle and River, neither of which featured his input on the screenplay, they seem like for-hire projects because they were, very clearly, genre pictures. They were made for comparatively little money to make a tidy profit, and they basically just needed someone to yell "Cut!"

Hanson did a lot more than that. It's been at least 15 years since I've seen either of these movies, and probably closer to 20, but on my last viewing of Cradle in particular, I remembered what a tight little package it was, how it moved smoothly from to scene to scene in producing an intensely satisfying story about a psychotic nanny. Some of that credit likely goes to the lean script by Amanda Silver, but it takes a director with a particular understanding of the fundamentals of filmmaking to deliver a lean script into a lean film. In fact, I use Cradle as an unlikely go-to example of a movie where nary a scene is wasted.

But Cradle alone probably wouldn't have caused me to excessively ponder Hanson's merits as a genre filmmaker without being paired with The River Wild, a truly tense and harrowing spiritual successor to Deliverance in which Meryl Streep and David Straitharn play the parents in a family that gets kidnapped by Kevin Bacon and some of his redneck buddies on a rafting trip. I remember feeling a similar sense of the tightness of this film, the lack of fat, that kept things rolling along toward a satisfying conclusion. Again you might credit the screenwriter (this time Denis O'Neill), but taken in combination with Cradle, it really shows us what Hanson brought to that director's chair.

His very next film was Confidential, probably an unlikely successor, but the reward someone gets for doing a good job as a hired employee. He knocked it out of the park, and many think he should have won the best director Oscar in the year Titanic swept the Oscars. Instead he made another great film in 2000, Wonder Boys, which strayed further from his genre roots. 8 Mile was next, the returns diminishing only slightly.

Unfortunately, that was pretty much it for Hanson's time atop Hollywood. The returns started to noticeably diminish with In Her Shoes and especially Lucky You. It got so I didn't even see his final theatrical release, Chasing Mavericks, a project he had to leave halfway through for health reasons (ultimately being credited as a co-director with Michael Apted). It turns out Hanson also had Alzheimer's, a fact I did not know, and a possible/probable contributor to his death.

It's certainly the case that all directors have only a finite period at the top of their game, and almost anybody who makes five consecutive hits would have to be happy with that (if we are calling the two thrillers from the 1990s "hits"). And in truth, Hanson made some really good films before that, most notably the 1990 film Bad Influence, which I once loved but appreciated a lot less on my last viewing a couple years ago, else I might have featured it more prominently in this remembrance. Even the 1987 Steve Guttenberg film The Bedroom Window is a pretty solid technical achievement, if forgettable. (But let's not talk about the comedy he directed, the Tom Cruise vehicle Losin' It.)

But part of me thinks it's a shame that Hanson stopped making genre pictures. When people are really good at something that is considered less prestigious, they can get graduated out of it at their peril -- at our collective peril. Of course, never would I trade L.A. Confidential and Wonder Boys for more River Wilds. But Hanson may have been a victim of his own success, as those movies basically disqualified him from making another River Wild. The result was some really limp, uninspired "auteur movies" (In Her Shoes and Lucky You).

The loss of Hanson is meaningful enough to me that I may indeed watch something to remember him. But it won't be Wonder Boys (which I watched again only a couple months ago) and it won't be L.A. Confidential (which I do want to see again soon, having most recently caught it in 2012). No, I want to see one of those two for-hire thrillers, to remind myself what a skilled tradesman can do if just given the basic tools of the trade he loves.