"L.A. Confidential" (18) Screen at D'Olier Street, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin A riveting, densely plotted and brilliantly crafted thriller that's superbly acted by its imaginatively selected cast, L.A. Confidential finally launches its undervalued director and co-writer, Curtis Hanson, to the forefront of American film-makers. Adapted from the pulp novel by James Ellroy, it marks a major leap forward and a wholly assured achievement from Hanson, a director who displayed a crisp efficiency, a keen sense of dramatic tension and an expert eye for casting in such solid but mostly underestimated movies as The Bedroom Window, Bad Influence, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle and The River Wild.
Set over four months beginning at Christmas, 1952, Hanson's L.A. Confidential is a complex, intelligent and dynamic thriller which evokes Chinatown in its well-delineated background of Los Angeles emerging as a city through a pall of corruption; The Usual Suspects in its teasingly elaborate and skilful plotting; and the work of Sam Peckinpah in its depiction of a tough, male-dominated milieu and in its dazzling climactic shoot-out.
With Accentuate The Positive playing ironically on the soundtrack, the movie opens on a promotional film for Los Angeles selling the city as "paradise on earth", where the sun shines, work is plentiful, property is cheap - and there's always the prospect of being discovered as a movie star. The movie that follows presents the very flipside of that calculatedly upbeat message, depicting a harsh and lurid world of murder, drugs, prostitution, blackmail and corruption.
Adroitly distilled by Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson from James Ellroy's vast, detailed novel, L.A. Confidential is a jigsaw of a movie which concerns the Los Angeles Police Department from its most virtuous to its most venal members in a taut saga of dedication, duplicity, criminal ambitions and multiple murders. Labyrinthine as its intricate plot line is, it is a singular pleasure to work with it and chart its unravelling.
At its centre are three LAPD men of sharply contrasting personality. Kevin Spacey stars as the brash, high-profile Sergeant Jack Vincennes, who has a lucrative sideline as technical adviser on the laudatory TV cop show, Badge Of Honor (clearly based on Dragnet) and engages in sensationalistic vice busts on showbiz personalities as fodder for Sid Hugeons (Danney DeVito) who's as sleaezy as Hush-Hush, the scandal sheet he publishes.
Guy Pearce plays the incorruptible detective Ed Exley, the son of a legendary cop and such a ruthlessly ambitious young man in his own right that he willingly risks being despised by his colleagues. And Russell Crowe is cast as Bud White, a hard, driven and volatile officer who is single-minded - and sometimes brutally violent - in his idealistic quest for justice.
The scenario's other principal characters are Exley's paternalistic mentor, the truly pragmatic Captain Dudley Smith (played by James Cromwell, who was the kindly farmer in Babe); the smooth, schmoozing pimp, Pierce Patchett (David Strathairn) who hires out prostitutes who've undergone plastic surgery to resemble movie stars; and the enigmatic Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger), a Veronica Lake lookalike.
Directed with vibrant panache by Hanson, L.A. Confidential is a terrific thriller, lean, taut and deeply involving, and rich in moral complexity. It skilfully plays with - and regularly defies - conventions and expectations raised by our familiarity with its noir roots.
Working with art director Jeannine Oppewall and costume designer Ruth Myers, Hanson's evocation of the movie's period is as authentic as it is unshowy, and the film is shot in vivid wide-screen images by Dante Spinotti. The mood and pacing are further enhanced by the rhythmic editing of Peter Honess and the powerhouse score composed by the great Jerry Goldsmith.
In assembling a superlative cast, Hanson's masterstroke was the casting of two young Australian actors unfamiliar to American audiences in key roles. As the intense Ed Exley, Guy Pearce, a survivor of both Home And Away and Neighbours and the youngest of the three drag queens in Priscilla, is simply a revelation. And Russell Crowe, whose range has extended from a vicious skinhead in Romper Stomper to a cheerful, working-class gay man in The Sum Of Us, plays Bud White with an edge that Bruce Willis barely could imagine. Shamefully, L.A. Confidential went entirely unrewarded at Cannes this year, presumably because of the jury's anti-Hollywood snobbery. With two months to go before the end of the year, it would be premature to declare it the best movie of 1997, but it's a cast-iron contender.
"Wilde" (18) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin Born to be Wilde? Not Stephen Fry, despite all the hoopla surrounding his casting as Oscar in Brian Gilbert's wet, unilluiminating biopic, Wilde, a pedestrian British heritage movie that's tarted up with some coy male nudity and pays substantially more thought and attention to dressing (and undressing) its characters and the world they inhabit than to what's going on in their heads. And while passably looking the part, Fry's Wilde is a weak, ineffectual wimp, a fey fop portrayed as the helpless victim of his homosexual desires.
It opens like a western - the only fresh idea in the movie - as Wilde, on a lecture tour in Colorado in 1882, visits a silver mine and over a whiskey supper gives a talk to the bare-chested miners, ogling them as he speaks and signalling his awareness of his dormant gay urges.
The movie whisks us back to London, through Oscar's marriage to Constance Lloyd (Jennifer Ehle) and the birth of his two sons, before Oscar is seduced by his Canadian houseguest, Robbie Ross (Michael Sheen). "I feel like a city that's been under siege for 20 years and the gates have just been flung open," sighs Oscar after having sex with a man for the first time.
Cut to the triumphant first night of Lady Windermere's Fan and Wilde's fateful introduction to the handsome Oxford undergraduate, Lord Alfred Douglas, aka Bosie (Jude Law), and on to the decadent world of rent boys and voyeuristic sex which the preening, petulant Bosie savours. Enter Bosie's homophobic father, the Marquis of Queensbury (Tom Wilkinson) who describes Oscar as "a vile cur" and it's downhill all the way to two years' hard labour for Wilde in Reading Gaol.
Richard Ellman's biography of Wilde is the basis of the movie, and it's been reduced to a sketchy synopsis which glosses over Oscar's work and humour with the same indecent haste with which it discards to the periphery of the picture the characters of Constance and the two sons, and their place in the new gay life of this less than ideal husband. A limited actor best suited to the light comedy and caricature of Jeeves And Wooster or Cambridge graduates' buddy movies such as Peter's Friends, Stephen Fry is at his best when delivering Wilde's wittiest lines, but he seems so ill at ease for much of the movie that one tends to feel more sympathy for him than for Oscar. It is, at best, a brave but failed performance, but by no means the worst in the film. That distinction must to go to Vanessa Redgrave who plays Oscar's mother, Speranza, in a fright-wig and with a ludicrous and quite inappropriate Oirish accent. Had she asked her son-in-law, Liam Neeson, he surely would have steered her in the right direction.
In Wilde it is the villains of the piece who are the most firmly etched and commanding characters - Tom Wilkinson's gruff Marquis of Queensbury, and especially Jude Law who acutely catches Bosie in all his selfishness, cruelty and debauchery as someone simultaneously attractive and repellent.
"Fools Rush In" (15) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin Yet another attempt at romantic comedy which brings together an unlikely couple, Fools Rush In is resolutely inane and strictly formulaic froth. Matthew Perry (Chandler in Friends) plays Alex, an uptight, ambitious New Yorker who works for a company which designs and builds night clubs.
Salma Hayek (from Desperado) is Isabel, a spirited Mexican-American photographer who believes in destiny.
They meet when he's on business in Las Vegas, spend the night together and don't see each other for three months - until Isabel calls to tell Alex she's pregnant by him. After an evening with her extended family, Alex and Isabel impulsively to decide to get married right away, even though they barely know each other.
Perry is utterly bland, while Hayek seems merely ill at ease in this slender yarn which is as predictable as it is unconvincing, and flatly directed by Andy Tennant.
Hugh Linehan adds: "Smilla's Feeling For Snow" 15 (UCI Tallaght, Omniplex Santry, selected cinemas nationwide) The Danish director Bille August was responsible for one of the worst examples of the "Euro-pudding" genre with his execrable adaptation of Isabel Allende's House Of The Spirits, and now he does similar violence to Peter Hoeg's bestselling psychological thriller, Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow, making a film that is psychologically shallow and far from thrilling. It seems a shame that a film-maker whose earlier credits include such fine films as Pelle The Conqueror and The Best Intentions should be reduced to producing such dull and vacuous rubbish.
Julia Ormond plays Smilla Jasperson, a truculent half-Greenlander who returns home one day to find that the small boy who lived in the apartment below her has fallen to his death on the icy street. Despite the stonewalling of the authorities, she sets out to discover what really happened, slowly (very slowly) uncovering a web of corruption and deceit which finally leads her back to her native Greenland. Along the way, she confronts powerful scientist Richard Harris and has a romantic interlude with brooding neighbour Gabriel Byrne. Other familiar faces include Vanessa Redgrave, Robert Loggia and Jim Broadbent, all contributing to a smorgasbord of accents which makes a mockery of August's avowal that his film is "about roots and identity".
