L.A. Confidential
I'm not sure why, but this movie was not at all what I thought it was going to be. I don't just mean in terms of quality — though it certainly was better than I was assuming — but in terms of kind. In my head, this film was fairly generic crime fodder of the sort typical in the late nineties (perhaps it's the generic name that threw me off base). Instead, it was — and I truly don't mean this as damning with faint praise — an incredibly competent, efficient, and propulsive movie that does not reinvent or transcend its genre but at its best is an exemplar of it.
The three leads are all very good. I learned that this was Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe's sort of coming-out performance stateside, the one that launched their respective careers. And they both felt, in my viewing, a little too well-calibrated to the tastes of nineties cinema: Crowe a little too ridiculous as the hothead, Pearce's character a little too pat and stone-faced. But both were really fun. And it made me appreciate Crowe's performance in the-nice-guys more retrospectively, as it's very much in conversation with his earlier work here.
That being said! Spacey absolutely dog-walks the two of them. Everything that Spacey is well known for as an actor is on full display — his entire performance is a mask. And his send-off is just as compelling as what brought him there. If there's one complaint I'd level purely from a plotting-and-structure perspective, it's that the film undoubtedly loses something with his departure.
This is an adaptation of James Ellroy's once-famous novel, and it's interesting to think about what gets lost in the adaptation. The book is an epic less concerned with gangsterdom and corruption per se than with power — the structures that build it, the people who wield it, the compromises it demands. The film necessarily compresses all of that into something tighter and more conventional, and what you gain in propulsion you lose in scope. But what a propulsive thing it is.