I was chilling one night long ago, listening the the ‘inside Breaking Bad’ podcast as a blogger with no life is wont to do, and the show’s creator Vince Gilligan sort of defined what I look for in TV and movies and maybe all of fiction. Paraphrasing, he said that all the work that goes into establishing, character, credibility, pace and building up the universe of a story and all the rest is ultimately about getting the most out of your moments of showmanship. That is to say the incredible scenes and sequences that make up a film or a show are actually the point, and all that plotting and story malarkey is the merely the stage which enables you to dance. Whether you subscribe to this theory or not, I believe these ascendant moments in cinema are worth celebrating, be they buried in a film that otherwise didn’t work or epitomize the qualities of the masterpiece. Let’s do this.
SPOILERS ARE POSSIBLE – SO BEWARE YE
The first film I’ve chosen to to dissect a single scene out of for praise is Curtis Hanson’ s ridiculously perfect L.A Confidential. Ironic really, considering this film is high in the running to be called one of the most balanced and honed movies ever made, one thing that works complimenting another thing that works forming a complex tapestry of things that work. The sense of control and near supernaturally rewarding coherence is all the more amazing considering the book it’s based on may as well have ‘I wrote this on crack’ as a blurb, such is the level of the convolution and tangenting (still fun though) That said, I believe there is one scene that defines all that is holy about L.A Confidential, and it’s the scene where Guy Pearce’s Ed Exley simultaneously interrogates three suspects in the notorious ‘Nite Owl’ killings. The scene runs only four minutes long, and while there other scenes that deal with greater revelations, greater surprises and bare more importance to the story, I don’t think any of them quite demonstrate what makes this movie a classic of our times quite like this, faultless grandstanding built on a foundation of such meticulous craft and completed homework.
We enter after Exley and Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) have apprehended three African American suspects of the afore-mentioned Nite Owl shootings, Sugar Ray, Lewis and Carl. Each sit in adjoining interrogation rooms, either shitting themselves or giving daggers to a single sheet one-sided glass, through which they can all be seen by the 20 plus cops stood behind it, including all our major players, Exley, Vincennes, Captain Dudley Smith (James Cromwell) and Bud White (Russell Crowe). The first stroke genius is in the mise en scene. We’ve all seen a thousand interrogations in movies, Law and Order’s, NCIS’s etc, so we know all the rhythm and rhyme of how these scenes work. But there’s two things that make this the final word of its type. The layout means the 20 or so cops act as a surrogate for the audience, they all mistrust and dislike Exley at this point just like we do -we’ve only see him be a rat and a goody two shoes so far – and we watch them being blown away by Exley’s hyper-competence just like we are. Exley bounces between suspects as he interrogates, having to take a walk in front of the gobsmacked cops each time he switches rooms. It’s a terrific device, because while most interrogation scenes play out long and slow, a duel between the suspect and the cop, this brims over with kinetic energy, and instead of a one on one we have a three on one, where the three are hopelessly outmatched, the one striding past his wowed audience after each blow he imparts, making it an act of theatre.
Although L.A Confidential is nominally an ensemble piece, Exley is the hero of the story, a nerd hero in film noir no less, a genre perpetually in awe of street smarts and where academic intelligence is usually the highway to corruption or cowardice. Exley is the goody two shoes who is everything he expects others to be, and it turns out that his A grades and hours of study and hard work actually make him a better cop than everyone else. This scene is the scene to show Exley is everything he says he is, worthy of our respect and worthy of being the one too root for in this story. Russell Crowe is perhaps the biggest presence in the movie, but Guy Pearce’s subtle, badass yet deceptively vulnerable performance as Exley is its secret strength. No more evident than in this scene, where he plays cold, understanding, fierce in a matter of moments. Whatever each suspect requires. I think the minor actors play their roles too to, particularly Jeremiah Birkett who plays the coolly accepting Sugar Ray. He repels Pearce’s nerd charisma well, and holds up his end of the scene.
The second ingenious writing device is Exley being able to pick and choose what the other suspects hear and when via intercom, timing the snippets of the conversation so it appears each suspect is stitching the other up. Seeing Carl soundlessly begging Sugar Ray not to inform on their drug dealer is a striking visual image, but mostly it emphasizes Exley’s power of the situation, the level of meticulous control he has. Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson’s script is eternally making difficult look easy in this film, but the sheer level of perfection in the various practical elements of the scene, the tech, the layout, the presence of the cops, of the increasingly furious Bud White, Exley’s approach to each suspect, is its own kind of masterful. It means that within seconds we’re seeing something new and exhilarating in a scene that by rights should feel familiar and by the numbers, and the set-up is so well thought through and airtight in that ‘we wrote 4000 drafts of this’ kind of way. You can’feel them feasting on their own hard work, reaping the profits of getting the scaffolding perfectly in place, and allowing the scene to explode of the page.
As we progress, Exley learns that although the suspects are fairly clueless when he brings up the nite owl, he gets them to confess that they are keeping a girl prisoner away in a house somewhere, that they kidnapped so Lewis, the suspect who is in a perpetual state of hysteria, could lose his virginity. They don’t know if she is dead or alive. White, who we know previously is particularly uncomfortable with violence against women in any variety, snaps and the scene ends as it must, with him bursting in, much to Exley’s chagrin, and getting her location by putting a gun in Carl’s mouth. Exley is undermined yet again, as is the right way of doing things, something which at this point of the story, Exley champions above all else. But it is nonetheless such a strong character building moment that are alliegences switch from White, the thug with the heart of gold, to this snotty character that is his antithesis.
In the course of this scene this is what we have accomplished, We’ve furthered the plot substantially, we’ve changed the perception of one of our three main characters, we’ve created a set-piece as thrilling as any action scene you care to name, and done so with everything feeling entirely organic and earned, all in 4 minutes. L.A Confidential’s genius is while it amazes, it amazes efficiently, every scene serves a purpose and there’s no undue sag or fat to be found anywhere. It’s complicated yet clear, rich yet pure. Thrilling yet intelligent. The interrogation scene is a microcosm of all these things working on all cylinders.
Oh did I mention this movie is utterly fucking boss? Coz it is.
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