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... Jack Vincennes to help him just as Jack is going through some papers dealing with the Matt Reynolds case. This scene is perhaps the central one of the movie, We find out that, just as Exley has a side that is like Jack Vincennes, he also has a side that is like Bud White. He too is driven by a private demon. Commonly, when we make value judgements about people we speak as if there were a single norm towards which everyone ought to be growing.
They " re supposed to succeed in becoming perfect specimens. You can tell whether they do by seeing how well they perform according to a checklist of desired features. We also speak as if people have an outside and an inside, and that on the inside, they " re really either good or bad. It's hard to analyze Ellroy's characters in these terms. For Bud White we'd have to say that he was warped by his early trauma. What his father did to him made him a brute, yet he still has enough inner decency to try to prevent women from being abused.
Or Wait a minute! is it the opposite? Maybe, he's a brute by nature and it's only thanks to the terrible thing that happened to his mother that he has some morality. Neither of these explanations seems to satisfy, because the framework on which they are constructed is inadequate. Bud doesn't seem to fit into a dichotomy of outside versus inside. Also, the things that make him bad seem more or less identical to the things that make him good: his hatred of violence towards women, his blind persistence.
Bud White doesn't seem to have had any chance at perfection. So, what can he do then, assuming he wants to make a decent adult out of himself? Maybe Bud has to start out from where he is and we have to interpret his current actions against that background instead of comparing them to an abstract, one-size-fits-all standard. L.
A. Confidential is about three men and a woman who find themselves in medias res. They don't get any single chance to decide forever what they " ll be. They " re already on the wrong side. They don't seem to be able to separate out their imperfections from their perfections, so their job seems to be to take all of what they " ve got, including their neuroses and the ghosts from their past, and to use it as raw material to continuously reconstruct themselves. They can't make themselves perfect: the moving finger has already written and moved on.
The things that they go through, terrible as they are, do give them a chance to make themselves better. The phrase ensemble acting is overworked in the vocabulary of movie critics lately. Still, it describes exactly what L. A. Confidential has got. You don't go away awe-struck with any of the individual actors, but with the group as a whole.
Part of what they are successful at is supporting each other and supporting the film itself. You have to think about it in order to realize how excellent they are as individuals. This includes all of the major and many of the minor roles. James Cromwell is natural, playing a variety of moods with perfect focus. For example, in the scene where he takes the command of the Nite Owl investigation away from Ed Exley.
Kevin Spacey is perhaps at his very best in the scene quoted above, his mood shifting from moment to moment, yet always supporting the several levels of ambiguity involved and cumulatively building up a very complex picture. Guy Pearce is successful in creating the particular kind of clean-cut, self-serving do-good that we had plenty of in the ' 50 s but that seems to have disappeared. He is able to show us that Exley's really a poorly fused mixture of two or three different personalities. Pearce's characterization is very sharp. For example, the sequence of recognition, calculation, and counter-calculation that flickers across his face in a second when the real culprit inadvertently betrays himself by saying the name "Rollo Thomas. " Pearce contains this flicker so well that we " re amazed at Exley's self-control, but still he betrays just enough that the culprit sees it. Bud White is not notable for his subtlety, but this doesn't mean that Russell Crowe gets a free ride.
Most notably, there is a scene where he believes that the woman he loves has betrayed him. He shows a combination of hurt, anger, and willingness to be weak in front of a woman that he's committed to. Not to mention raw emotional power. The requirements for an actress to be able to play Lynn Bracken are very high. We first see Bracken as she walks into a liquor store wearing a cape that would look ridiculous on most women, but only looks quietly regal on Kim Basinger. There's a scene in which Ed Exley confronts Bracken, and Basinger shows herself emotionally stronger and more flexible than he is.
She easily defeats him, in more ways than we realize at the time. Throughout, it's important that Bracken also be tender and vulnerable. Toward the end there is a scene, in which Bracken is hurt and Basinger has just one line in which to convey to us that Bracken knows that she did more injury than she received and she's sorry for it. Altogether, Kim Basinger richly deserves the Academy Award she won for this role. Some people who have looked to L. A.
Confidential for a period cops-and-robbers movie have had somewhat mixed reactions to what they got from it. For people who are attuned to the problems that James Ellroy is interested in, and who pick up these strands as well, this is a very potent movie. Read our essay L. A. Confidential and Racism. Links for L.
A. Confidential, the Novel From flux europa, a comprehensive and helpful article on the L. A. Quartet as a whole, THE MADHOUSE OF THE SKULL: James Ellroy's 'LA Quartet' Ellroy Confidential / Ellroy Confidential. Available in French or English.
Nicely researched and presented. Yahoo. Top: Arts: Humanities: Literature: Genres: Mystery: Auth ors: Ellroy, James. The Mysterious Home Page.
Specific authors: James Ellroy. Links. From Tangled Web, Capsules of several Ellroy books. From Salon magazine, James Ellroy Interview. James Ellroy mailing list. In the body of the message put the following.
o L. A. Confidential: The Screenplay Links for L. A. Confidential, the Film Look up further information about L. A.
Confidential in the IMDb. Read more about L. A. Confidential at Cinema 1.
Cinema 1 est disponible tamil en espanol. Get the complete dope at a fan's L. A. Confidential site. Russell: Something to Crowe About. Visit the official New Regency L.
A. Confidential site. Bibliography: m. passing
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Research essay sample on L A Confidential Things That Make Ellroy
