On Further Viewing... L.A. Confidential

Since the fall of 2009, I've been thinking more and more about how the last ten years have affected my outlook and taste. Since I've amassed a pretty decent collection of DVDs dating from the early 2000s, I've decided that it would be fun to revisit the movies that I liked back around the beginning of the decade to get a critical look at how well they've held up. This is the (long overdue) third of the series.

The movie: L.A. Confidential was a critical darling and a pretty successful 1997 pulp-noir film that was more or less overshadowed in the popular imagination by Titanic-mania, although it did net Oscars for Kim Basinger (Best Supporting Actress) and Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson (Best Adapted Screenplay). It's an adaptation of James Ellroy's novel of the same name.

What I thought at the time: I went into L.A. Confidential as a high-schooler thinking that it was going to be lame because of the 1950s period setting. Instead, I was blown away by the labyrinthine plot, violence, and blackhearted cynicism. It was probably one my first exposure to noir as a genre (although it's more of a homage), and it definitely sparked an interest in the form.

On further viewing: As a movie, L.A. Confidential is a great by pretty much any measure, but it's one of the absolute best adaptations ever made. The novel L.A. Confidential is brilliant but unfilmable: the plot of the book is incredibly convoluted and spans decades, and just establishing the sheer amount of characters would take most of the running time of a feature film. The movie trims all that down drastically, yet still manages to capture the spirit of the book to a surprising degree. How?

A big factor is the white-hot laser perfection of the casting. Check this list: along with Basinger, L.A. Confidential features Kevin Spacey when he was still good, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Danny DeVito, James Cromwell, and David Strathairn. Although the plot diverges significantly from the source material, the characters are incredibly faithful, and a surprising amount of Ellroy's world comes through in small details peppered into the background. The screen adaptation smartly plays up the dynamic between underestimated hothead police officer Bud White (Crowe) and coolly analytic careerist detective Ed Exley (Guy Pearce). Both actors disappear into their roles completely; re-watching L.A. Confidential reminds me why Russell Crowe is a major star and why Guy Pearce ought to be one (seriously, between this, Memento, and The Proposition, how many more reasons do casting directors need to put Pearce in their movies?).

The screenplay, which doesn't so much reproduce the plot of the novel as distill it into an extremely streamlined form, rarely suffers from the abridgment. The only real exception to this is Jack Vincennes' (Kevin Spacey) character arc, which is pretty severely pared down and ends in an effective but somewhat contrived twist that feels transparently motivated by the need to get to the third act underway. On the whole, though, there's remarkably few seams for such a complicated endeavor.

A final aspect of L.A. Confidential that bears mention is the direction and the visual design. It must have been tempting to do the film as a fanboy-style homage to 1950s noir, but director Curtis Hanson downplays the anachronisms and recasts the genre to acknowledge the cultural and technical changes in filmmaking. Hanson's version emphasizes naturalistic acting, elaborate set design, masterful widescreen cinematography, and unrestrained profanity and violence, none of which were trademarks of the heyday of crime noir. Even though the film's unmistakably a period piece, there's a heavy emphasis on contemporary elements that make it compulsively watchable for non-genre buffs. The modern feel of L.A. Confidential has the side benefit of calling attention to the thematic parallels with the LAPD's early-90s corruption scandals without being heavy-handed about it.

In the final accounting, L.A. Confidential does justice to Ellroy's book. Hollywood is one for two in feature adaptations of Ellroy's work, with the demerit being Brian DePalma's campy butchering of The Black Dahlia. Apparently, George Clooney was cast as the lead in White Jazz, but dropped out. It's a shame, he's perfect for that character. What I'd really like to see is a big-budget miniseries adaptation of American Tabloid, Ellroy's fantastic historical conspiracy noir centered around the Kennedy assassination. Apparently this may actually happen, with HBO's backing. I'll believe it when I see it, but if it happens, it could really be something to look forward to.

On Further Viewing...Fight Club

With the end of the decade rapidly approaching, I've been thinking more and more about how the last ten years have affected my outlook and taste. Since I've amassed a pretty decent collection of DVDs dating from the early 2000s, I've decided that it would be fun to revisit the movies that I liked back around the beginning of the decade to get a critical look at how well they've held up. This is the second of the series.

The movie: Despite being a money loser theatrically, Fight Club achieved a sort of instant cultural ubiquity among my early 2000s demographic of late-adolescent college males. Fight Club's reception and cultural legacy, which I'll discuss it more below, is at least as interesting as the film itself.

My reaction at the time: When I saw Fight Club in the theater, I liked it quite a bit but had mixed feelings about the third-act twist (again, more below). By the time it came out on home video, though, I had become a full-fledged member of the cult of Fight Club. It was one of the first movies I bought on DVD (by the way, early '00s DVDs look terrible on modern HDTVs), and I've seen it who-knows-how many times, although when I watched it this evening, I hadn't viewed it since probably 2004.

On further viewing: Fight Club is one of the best movies of the 1990s, and from an artistic and thematic standpoint, is one of the most singular American films ever made. After re-watching it, I'm fairly convinced that the late 90s is the only historical period that could have produced Fight Club; the violence and subtle thematic complexity would have been toned way down if it were made five or ten years prior, and no post-9/11 studio movie would ever end with the protagonist watching a landscape of collapsing skyscrapers.

Beyond the content concerns, a good deal of Fight Club's themes are difficult to separate from the cultural context of the late 1990s. Fight Club was made in the late-Clinton years, when the Dow Jones was valued at roughly 90 trillion points, the national unemployment rate was at 4%, and the most pressing political issue of the era was the president copping a blowjob on the side and then lying about it. As a result, Fight Club deals largely with the ennui the characters experience as a result of the fact that they live in a culture that is unprecedentedly safe, predictable, and homogenous, which was for the most part, the way life was in that era.

Ten years on, that's not the culture we live in anymore. When a significant portion of young America is serving in one of two foreign wars (or dealing with the aftermath), the angst and displacement of the comfortable are necessarily far less pressing issues. Even for those not in the military, American culture in the last seven or eight years has been defined far less by safety and comfort and far more by combativeness and stridency, to the point where the president of the United States can't give a boilerplate speech about responsibility to schoolkids without sparking a political firestorm. I don't know if 18 year old kids today connect with Fight Club the way they did in 1999 (maybe they do -the fact that it's #19 on the user-rated imdb top 250 has to mean something), but I think that a big part of the immediacy Fight Club held then has been lost in the post-9/11 shift.

This isn't to imply that Fight Club can't be appreciated by first time viewers today. I love Citizen Kane, and I wasn't born until more than 40 years after William Randolph Hearst's stranglehold on American print media ended. (And yes, I did just compare Fight Club to Citizen Kane, and I'll do it again in a couple paragraph's time.) Fight Club's exploration of heady topics like radicalism and masculinity don't come with an expiration date. Beyond that, the movie's plain fun to watch; it's got a wicked, sly sense of humor, a distinct visual style, and two great lead performances by Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. Pitt's iconic Tyler Durden gets the lion's share of the attention, but Norton is the linchpin of the movie; he has to serve as the audience's surrogate for the experience of being involved with Tyler Durden without coming across as a bland or blank character, and he pulls it off so masterfully that one can almost miss the fact that his character in the movie doesn't even have a name.

It's impossible to engage in a discussion of Fight Club without noting that it's one of the most widely misinterpreted movies ever made. A substantial proportion of Fight Club viewers, including both detractors and many of the film's most devoted fans, see the movie as being on some levels an endorsement or approval of Tyler Durden's pseudo-anarchist philosophy. Roger Ebert's 1999 negative review, which underrates the film substantially in my opinion, is nonetheless extremely prescient in predicting this. The most amazing thing about how widespread this point of view is that it requires one to literally disregard the entire third act of the film after it's revealed that (spoiler alert, but come the fuck on, you've seen this movie) Tyler Durden is actually the narrator's alternate personality and the narrator embarks on a frantic quest to undo everything that he's spent the entire movie setting up.

The fact that Fight Club will probably be forever tarred with inspiring the kind of nihilistic idiocy and pedantic radicalism it critiques is unfortunate, but it serves to highlight one of the film's greatest strengths. Fight Club understands that Tyler Durden's "fuck society" mentality is tremendously seductive, particularly for young men still in the process of establishing their social identity. Rather than watering this fact down to set up the narrator's eventual enlightenment for the easy win, the film goes for broke in ensuring that the audience has the same reaction to Tyler Durden that the narrator does. The fact that Tyler is played by a notorious Hollywood hunk at his absolute physical peak is not a minor detail, and thematically speaking, the character-reversing twist is completely necessary. Maintaining Tyler Durden as a separate character would turn Fight Club a movie about peer pressure, rather than one about responsibility and moral identity.

The unfortunate side effect of the character split is that it makes for a jarring shift in tone that leads to somewhat of a dip in the initial experience of watching the film's climax. Even though the Tyler-narrator duel is thematically resonant, it's admittedly pretty goofy to watch Edward Norton beat himself up from the perspective of a parking garage security camera. By the time the narrator finally defeats Tyler Durden by shooting himself in the mouth (and surviving), someone less favorably disposed to the film than I am could credibly claim that Fight Club has ditched narrative coherency in favor of psychoanalytic fuckery. It's here that I bring in Citizen Kane for the second time to point out that one could make the same argument about 'Rosebud' being a sled, with the obvious caveat that this reveal in Kane came five seconds before the credits rather than thirty minutes.

If a central message of Fight Club can be identified, it's this: if you want to make radical choices, be careful that the alternative isn't the same thing or worse. This point is hammered home again and again over the course of the movie: Tyler Durden's individuality-seeking disciples become drone-like "space monkeys", the fight club is conceived as a rejection of touchy-feely support groups and winds up with the same hugging and crying, and the narrator's alternating attempts to reject and attract Marla Singer always wind up having the opposite effect. It's a message that in some respects, one needs to grow into; I have to confess that when I first saw Fight Club as a senior in high school, I thought Tyler Durden was awesome and that the ending of the movie was sort of confusing and disappointing. Looking back now, I find it somewhat comforting that the Tyler Durden-quoting campus radical might one day revisit his (you know that this person will invariably be male) favorite movie and find that there's more to it than initially met the eye.

Still worth seeing? Most definitely. Just please don't start beating on your friends or vandalizing Starbucks stores afterwards.

On Further Viewing... The Matrix

With the end of the decade rapidly approaching, I've been thinking more and more about how the last ten years have affected my outlook and taste. Since I've amassed a pretty decent collection of DVDs dating from the early 2000s, I've decided that it would be fun to revisit the movies that I liked back around the beginning of the decade to get a critical look at how well they've held up. This is the first of the series.

The movie: Does it really need any introduction? Released way back in 1999, The Matrix not only made a shit-ton of money at the box office, but it enjoyed a surprisingly positive critical reception and became one of the first mega-selling DVD releases. A fair number of people were convinced at the time that the inevitable Matrix franchise would dominate the 2000s blockbuster scene.

My reaction at the time: Pretty much the same as everyone else's. I was floored by The Matrix in the theaters and probably saw it four or five times on DVD (also, once on VHS). I wasn't necessarily a full-fledged member of the Matrix semi-cult that existed for a brief time before being unceremoniously disbanded by 2003's The Matrix Reloaded.

On further viewing...: Ten years on, The Matrix actually holds up pretty well. Although the critical focus tend to heavily involve the philosophical themes of the movie, it's important to recall that The Matrix primarily set itself apart from its action-movie contemporaries in the late 90s in more aesthetic ways. In my mind, the real innovation of The Matrix was the manner in which the Wachowski brothers wedded the choreography of Hong Kong action flicks to noir-inspired cinematography and production design. Since the mid to late 90s produced relatively few persevering action movies, it's easy to forget today just how badly shot and staged most action set pieces were in those days; the typical gun or fist fight was a mishmash of medium-close shots and cutaways that completely sabotaged the kinetic and dramatic intentions of the scene. By contrast, the action sequences in The Matrix consist almost exclusively of medium-long or long shots, so you can actually see what's going on, and make judicious use of slow motion for dramatic effect and to accentuate just how well-composed most of the shots are (The Matrix's cinematographer, Bill Pope, is brilliant at shooting action sequences in anamorphic widescreen, see also - seriously - Team America: World Police).

The Matrix also gets points for proper use of Keanu Reeves as the My-First-Anagram-named lead character, Neo. Lots of film fans like to beat up on Keanu because of the fact that he has no range, but he's actually very effective in roles that play to his strengths. One of the big flaws of action movie leads is that they're too commonly take-charge ultimate badass types from the outset of the film, which sort of precludes any meaningful character development over the course of the plot. Keanu's bullheaded-but-naive-and-slightly-dim stock character is a natural fit for a movie that plays up the lead's initial ignorance of the central conflict.

He also ingratiates himself by literally playing the only major character that doesn't spontaneously break out into a portentous monologue whenever their mouth is open. I'd forgotten what a talky movie The Matrix is (I hadn't forgotten that fact about the sequels, though). The worst offender is, of course, Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus, but most of the rest of the cast get their chance to spout off, including minor villain Joe Patoliano, who engages in one of the more egregious examples of "monologuing" in recent movie history. Some of the cast actually adapt to this fairly well: Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith character gets away with it because of his idiosyncratic vocal cadence, and Gloria Foster brings the perfect tone of matronly warmth to her scene as the Oracle. Despite that, I wish there were fewer spoken meditations on the nature of belief and reality and so forth.

Of course, the metaphysical angle of The Matrix is a big part of what hooked its more avid fans. Even though the philosophical subtext of the movie isn't subtle, it's broad enough that a wide range of pet interpretations are possible. Religious commentators pointed to the array of Christian, Buddhist, and Gnostic themes woven into the plot. Undergraduate Naomi Klein disciples read it as a metaphor for the false consciousness created by American capitalism. Philosophy professors showed clips from the movie to explain Plato's Republic. And so on, and so forth.

The beauty is that all of these readings are probably equally valid; The Matrix films are on the whole far more interested in philosophical masturbation than making a consistent thematic point. This probably explains a large amount of the indifference with which the two sequels were met. I think that extent of the fanboy backlash to The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions is a bit overstated (especially in the case of the third film), but it's undeniable that the sequels have at least one bad idea to match every good one. The Matrix, on the other hand, continues to retain its popular appeal; it sits at #26 on imdb's user-voted list of the top 250 films of all time, below Sunset Blvd and ahead of Dr. Strangelove.

Still worth seeing?: Sure. Even disregarding the rest of the strengths of The Matrix, the high-rise invasion rescue shootout alone put it up there as one of the best action movies of all time.