The Edge of the Gulf

by Hadley Hury

  In the 1952 of L.A. Confidential, the facade of the American Dream is getting a good buff everywhere, but nowhere as energetically as in the city that has become the western outpost of that dream, where people get off the bus to do, well, they may not even know, but something better than from whence they came. You can eat oranges right off the trees and stars are born every day. And if the American Dream, like any great dream of mankind’s, needs a face in order to move the masses, then Hollywood is the place that gave it to us. L.A. is the Face Capital of the World. Through the depths of the Depression, the movies reflected an American public that had grit and sentiment, laughter, and even glamour, whether the mirror was accurate or not. And during the War years, they showed us all together on the home front, waiting for victory, in one homey back lot hometown, as often as not, singing and dancing. After the boys came home, Hollywood (almost despite itself) gave us some faces more troubled, less certain, less composed, faces that had seen some trust, whether with the American Dream or a buddy or a dame, broken. Hollywood, however, doesn’t ever flirt too long with the dark side. So now it’s 1952, and Ike’s been elected and McCarthy’s going to get rid of the Communists, and we’re all learning How To Win Friends and Influence People. We’re putting on a happy face and a busily moral face, and if you can’t be happy and be moral, you sure as hell better look that way.

  L.A. Confidential is not merely appropriately named, it is, like many a fine film or novel, so steeped in its sense of place that it is impossible to imagine the story coming to life anywhere else. Its themes—appearance vs. reality, corruption, heroism, and love’s redemption—are universal. And the fact that these forces are at war for the soul of an urban police department seems broadly applicable: after decades of serial television and investigative news stories, the institution has become one of our most visible moral battlegrounds, a microcosm of society’s fault lines. Not only is L.A. Confidential not just an easily transplantable NYPD episode or Serpico gone south, its title city transcends its function of background to become one of the primary characters. Not one of the film’s intricately woven plot lines could breathe anywhere but in the hothouse atmosphere of La La Land; none of the story’s central characters would confront their demons or their dreams as they do here, interacting with the schizophrenic entity that has become the church and state of illusory values. L.A. Confidential brings us face to face with Los Angeles, home to human expatriates in exile from themselves, city of angels rising and descending, improbable earth mother, waterless, glamorous, putrefied. This unique city is as uniquely inescapable in a consideration of this film’s impact as it was in such memorably L.A.-centric works as In a Lonely Place, Sunset Boulevard, The Bad and the Beautiful, Day of the Locust, Chinatown, Tequila Sunrise, and The Player. Not to mention that Jacobean soap opera, the O.J. Simpson case.

  At the heart of L.A. Confidential is the relationship between Bud White (Russell Crowe), a tough, sad-eyed, loyal young cop, who wants to do the right thing but is painfully suspended in a state of suppressed fury by department superiors who use his brawn for their back-room intimidation sessions, and Ed Exley (Guy Pearce), a rule-book model officer whose ambition and unyielding standards do not make him popular with the rank and file. There’s plenty not to like about both. One of the beauties of the film is that it never rushes our sympathies; it gives us just enough about each man to interest us as the film’s convoluted plot lines slowly come together for full gallop to the finish. Only in the final scenes of the film do we experience, all the more powerfully for it being something of a surprise, a depth of feeling and of respect for them both.

  One of their colleagues is Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey), a guy who’s gotten so smooth he can’t stop himself from outrageous displays of verbal smarminess, even though we can see there’s an acrid taste of self-loathing, or at least self-fatigue, when he does it. Vincennes is adviser to the TV cop show “Badge of Honor” and something of a minor celebrity. He takes small pay-offs and we sense that his inner barometer about what’s too small to bother with or too vile to touch is less reliable that it used to be. He turns his head so often it’s in a perpetual swivel. Spacey is extraordinarily adroit at making Vincennes, at once, faintly disgusting and touchingly sympathetic. When he tries to turn what we know could be a big corner in his life, we root for him; and it hurts when he answers Exley’s question about why he became a cop. It’s Spacey’s most galvanizing moment: there’s an attempt at the usual glibness, followed by a wide-eyed, wordless straining at truth; followed by the actual, crushing truth: “I don’t remember.” Vincennes is the perfect cop for a world founded on duplicity; he’s acting, and he’s been acting for so long that he’s forgotten to remember where all the bodies are buried. Too late he realizes that among them is his own.

  Danny DeVito is exuberantly trashy as Sid Hudgens, verminish reporter for Hush-Hush magazine. He and Vincennes occasionally trade favors: Jack’ll set up the vice bust of a starlet and tip Sid to be there with his cameras. James Cromwell plays Lieutenant Dudley Smith as a benign Irish patriarch and, amazingly, does so without resorting to cliché. It’s a cunningly crafted performance and should dispel the notion, held in some quarters, that his Oscar nomination three years ago for his role as the farmer in Babe was a fluke. As Pierce Patchett, an elegantly tailored Brentwood gentleman who runs a high-class string of hookers, whom he sends to hairdressers or even plastic surgeons to heighten their resemblance to stars of the day, David Straitharn continues a string of low-key but vividly eccentric performances that are mesmerizing in their variety.

  It’s hard to imagine any two actors being more suited, more innately right, than Crowe and Pearce for the two leads. Which is precisely the point. In one of the smarter moves made on any major film this year, Hanson wisely avoided using better-known stars (and managed to talk the producers into it). The pay-off for the audience is enormous; we are allowed to experience fully our seduction by the film’s suspense, its sensuousness, its ideas, because we are not distracted with projecting star expectations onto the personas on the screen. There’s nothing to get in the way of the good work here, and it’s very good, indeed; the characterizations are finely drawn. Even the physical opposition of the actors’ good looks have room to work: Crowe’s heaviness of experience sits uneasily on his brow; Pearce’s chiseled righteousness is matched by his cheekbones.

  In another instance, it’s hard to imagine how what the audience does know about an actor’s historical baggage could add more to a performance. The face that is most familiar among the cast of L.A. Confidential belongs to Kim Basinger. Her performance as Lynn Bracken, a Veronica Lake look-alike from Patchett’s agency, accrues its emotional heft precisely because moviegoers have watched her migration in recent years from blonde sexpot to would-be dramatic and comedic actor, to owner of a small town in Georgia, to bankruptcy and box office poison after being sued for conduct deemed unbecoming by a major studio, to marriage to Alec Baldwin, motherhood, and a measured, modest comeback. It’s all there. And it makes her love for Officer White nearly unbearable in its wounded tough-cookie need.

  Hanson and Helgeland have handled the neat convolutions of Ellroy’s crime thriller with cinematic finesse, and even though Hanson’s sense of pace and stylistic integrity are sinuous and sophisticated, the real fuel here, as in the noir classics of the ’40s and early ’50s, is emotion. Last week, speaking at the fifth Film Preservation Festival, director Martin Scorsese said of those films: “They were about descending into a labyrinth where anything can happen, including the death of the protagonist.”

  For 135 minutes, L.A. Confidential takes us with it on such a descent, and not one frame of this remarkable film tips its hand as to whether we’ll go to hell or, if we do, whether we’ll come back. We end up on the edge of our seat, yearning for two protagonists, both anti-heroes—one of whom, not long before, we’d taken to be a psychotic thug and the other a reptilian prig—to gun their way to a compromised moral victory, to make us believe again in at least
the possibility of integrity.

  Odd that for many who see this movie, in which the city of movies looms so large, its white hot light streaked with the shadows of palm trees and ghosted with celluloid shadows, it may be, in the end, not other movies about L.A. or the movies that are recalled first to mind. It might well be a film made in 1952, High Noon—another exploration of the American Dream, violent evil, and our constantly reforming need to find a face, however unlikely, we can trust.

  Chapter 25

  Terry watched the highway intently. They were driving through the deluge in tarry blackness. Michael kept his eyes on the road, too, as though he were deciphering Terry’s instructions on a watery grid in front of the headlights. Terry spoke slowly and distinctly as the torrents slashed noisily around them.

  “The people who are staying at his house will be out of town a week from Sunday. He usually goes out for dinner and gets home between eleven and eleven-thirty. He’s always up in the bedroom by midnight and asleep by twelve-thirty.”

  Occasionally he would make a point by turning for a moment toward Michael, inviting a quick return glance.

  “You have the gun?”

  “Yes. I hid it like you told me to when you gave it to me.”

  “You’re sure you’re comfortable with it?”

  “Oh, yeah. I had it out in the woods just that once to fool around with a little bit. If you grow up in the hills of South Carolina, you gonna grow up with guns.”

  “Okay. Good.” They drove along 98 in silence for a long time, the rain billowing in concentric waves against the truck as the storm rotated around them and moved off toward the east. About three miles east of the 26-A cutoff to Rosemary Beach, Terry pulled off into a gravel and shell lane that led into a small stand of pines, coming to a halt just behind another pickup off on the right side. He cut the engine and turned slightly toward Michael, reaching out and laying his hand on his shoulder.

  “Michael. Like Miss Rachel said, the Lord is waiting for you now, and we are all with you. I will get a copy of the key to you next week and I will have tried it to make certain that it works smoothly. And I will have the alarm code. We have thought of everything. Taken care of everything. All will be well for you to carry out God’s justice as he has called you to do. And to leave the letter exposing this evil to the world.” Michael looked over his shoulder into the backseat, at the two videos he had brought back to Terry when they’d met to go to the pier. He shook his head, and he looked at Terry with barely suppressed disgust.

  Terry said, “I know. It’s sickening and it’s the very face of evil. I could only watch part of one and it made me throw up. But Michael, I wanted you to watch them again for a reason. I wanted you to look one more time on the work of this monster and to think again about what he did—and what he will continue to do, unless you help God make an example of his evil. He recruited the Reverend’s and Miss Rachel’s little brother into that world of drugs and sodomy and sadomasochistic evil and that poor eighteen-year-old boy was innocent. That boy is dead of AIDS now, and dozens like him, and that monster goes on, making more of these films, this devil’s work, and it is up to us to stop him. To let the sodomites know just as we are letting the abortionists know that God-fearing people are rising up in the army of the Lord and bringing our nation back to Him.”

  “It’s hard to believe people doing that stuff.” Michael shifted in his seat and scratched his shaggy beard.

  “Recruiting young people and converting them to their ways and then using them like you wouldn’t use a yard dog. Timothy is dead because of this man. But because God has sent you for this mission, he won’t be seducing any more young people into sodomy and evil and death! While he makes his secret money off their innocent flesh and his despicable perversion. And lives in his big house and acts like some big-shot pillar of the community, while his hired devils churn out this satanic filth in some back alley studio in New Orleans.” He paused. “Are you ready to serve the Lord and do his holy work, Michael? To send this Charlie Brompton to meet his Maker?”

  “Yes.” Michael stared at Terry in the dim light from the dashboard. Then he turned and opened the door into the hot, heavy rain. As he climbed down into the darkness, he looked back once more at Terry, his eyes glowing, wide open in the sluicing water. “Yes. I am.”

  Terry waited for the other truck to pull away, and then turned around and began the drive toward his cabin in Blue Mountain. He reached one arm back and grabbed the two videos—truly creepy things, one titled “Dungeon” and the other something like “Boot Camp II”—that he had found in Panama City. When he passed the next large condo complex, he pulled up to a large commercial dumpster wedged between a row of palmettos and a low wall, and, lifting the top, threw the videos in. As he drove away, he nuzzled into his damp pants pocket, pulled out the pack of cigarettes, and lit one. He exhaled deeply, cracking the two front windows about half an inch. He hated for the truck to smell like stale smoke.

  ***

  Terry navigated carefully through the slackening shafts of rain, but though his eyes were riveted on the two-lane highway and his hands clenched on the wheel for any sudden reaction, it was as though he drove unconsciously. His thoughts kept crawling around the events of the past few days.…

  He had picked them up as planned near the bridge across Western Lake that leads into the new resort.

  He had then pulled over on the north side of the highway into a small turn-out fishermen sometimes used.

  After Chaz apologized—“You understand, of course…”— insisting they step back into the trees to search Terry for any sort of recording device and Terry, in turn, did likewise with them, they emerged back onto the turnout and conferred very reasonably for nearly half an hour. Occasionally Terry gestured here and there as if indicating points of interest to them.

  In the first five minutes, he had read the letter which Sydney handed him in a book of maps. He asked them how he could possibly know whether the letter were even genuine, and Chaz said that he couldn’t except that they had absolutely no reason to make it up. Over the next ten minutes, they agreed that the only thing keeping all of them from getting what they deserved was Charlie Brompton.

  Finally, Sydney heard Chaz say—as scripted and yet with an unexpected pleasure that she found terrifying and exhilarating and oddly erotic—quite coolly, his large eyes locked on Terry’s: “I want that land.” He added, “If you’ll help us get it, you’ll not only get the Blue Bar, you’ll get five million dollars.”

  Sydney thought Terry looked a bit stunned, but he rolled his eyes and gave a little snort. “One, how? Two, why me?”

  For the next fifteen minutes, Chaz and Sydney outlined the situation.

  Charlie needed to die before making changes to his will at the end of July. Although it was no secret that Charlie owned the tract (he’d regularly been approached by potential buyers and developers over the years) he’d made a real point of never talking about it. His friends didn’t ask (many assumed he’d use his retirement to plan some low-development project), and Charlie didn’t tell (even his attorney didn’t yet know he’d seriously decided on the wilderness trust idea). Having the inheritance pass from Charlie’s unexpectedly predeceased heir to his son, as the will now stood, should come as no particular surprise to anyone.

  Terry interrupted. “How can you know that? About not even his lawyer knowing yet? Or believe anything your father said they’d talked about?”

  Without missing a beat Sydney answered, “Because in March, in his emotionally distraught state over his cousin’s death, he told Chaz so. And other than this rather sad exception of secretly taking sixty million out from under our noses, for his newly beloved Chaz’s own good, he is apparently congenitally honest. A man, though it chokes me to say it, of integrity. All that stuff Chaz told you was, we now confess, to get you to open up. We knew you’d been shafted, too. We just didn’t know how irritated you were about it.”

  Terry could do nothing but lean his head slightly
to one side, as if in court, nodding, a faint smile tensing on his lips.

  “And number two,” said Chaz, “why you? Because, Terry, we have much in common here. This well-meaning, generally kind and generous man seems not to be giving you a fair shake any more than he is me.”

  “You would think a gay man would have some special empathy for black sheep trying to go straight, wouldn’t you?” asked Sydney, with a playful smile.

  “You know about my past.”

  “Bingo,” said Chaz.

  “How?”

  “Doesn’t really matter,” said Chaz. “Old Southern gossip, you know. From a friend of a friend of a second cousin who, I believe, was your former wife.”

  “I hope you aren’t thinking of blackmail. No way it could work. That family will never say a word. They didn’t want it public then and they wouldn’t want it public now. You think you can blackmail them? Over less than two hundred fucking thousand dollars that they immediately covered eight years ago?”

  “Yes,” said Sydney. “Because, Terry, it’s a public company with ties to the nursing home business, and your former father-in-law is running for a city council seat this fall. The media love gothic family squalor and are at least mildly interested in a political candidate’s having cooked his books, especially if it had anything whatever to do with senior citizens on limited incomes. Even in New Orleans.”

  Sydney saw Terry stiffen, though all he said was, “You have no evidence, and believe me, whatever there was is history.”

  Chaz said, “Terry, they despise you. And you know how sensation-hungry the media is these days. If it comes to allegations in the press, which choice do you think your in-laws will make? Living through a whisper campaign that’ll run right through the primary about him being a questionable manager of the public trust, or a story that focuses on you, a criminal and a moral sleazeball who stole from his wife’s family and walked out on his seven-year-old daughter? The good people of New Orleans would forgive and forget his justifiable error. You, on the other hand, would get no less than four to six years, even with parole.”