City of angels.

'L.A. Confidential'

The movies have made us familiar with the good-bad cop. In fact, by now he is almost as much a stereotype as the strictly honorable detective or the thoroughly corrupt one. And what has helped to make the good-bad cop cliche is the fact that his seeming complexity is usually confined to the first reel and is jettisoned once the plot gets underway. In the recent Cop Land, for instance, Harvey Keitel starts off as an interesting mixture of compassion and rancor, bigotry and loyalty, but is soon revealed as a monochromatic monster ready to murder anyone who gets in the way, even fellow policemen. I hate to give Frank McConnell occasion to gloat but the TV heroes of "Law and Order" and "N.Y.P.D. Blue" make most of their big-screen counterparts look like stick figures.

Most, not all. In L.A. Confidential the characterizations are truly layered; vices and virtues not only coexist within each of the three detective-protagonists but, more disturbingly, some of the virtues depend upon vices, like a bright color primed by a less brilliant undercoating.

Take young Ed Exley. The son of a hero-cop, he is determined not only to equal his deceased father in gutsiness but to defy the so-called code of silence that keeps police crimes from being reported by fellow officers. When Ed, as the night supervisor of a station house, sees detectives brutalizing Mexican prisoners, he tries to stop them and, failing in that, courageously testifies against them. But wait a minute, is it really courage? The police riot has been in the newspapers and department honchos are therefore desperately seeking someone to epitomize the New Improved L.A. Cop. By testifying, Exley is consciously shoehorning himself into that role. He's a Serpico, yes, but he's a Serpico on the make.

So Exley's strictly a hypocrite, then? Well, in the middle of the movie, this ambitious twerp reopens a certain murder case that made him a hero and ensured his career when he (apparently) solved it. By reexamining it, Exley may be destroying himself but he's willing to risk that for the sake of the truth. So, a true hero after all! But hold on, the movie isn't over, Exley's ambition is still feeding on his soul, and there will be a few more surprises before the conclusion. The Australian actor Guy Pearce limns this gallant prig magisterially. There is a close-up of his face as he listens to a superior offering cynical praise and an equally cynical warning. Pearce's mouth, at first straight and prim, gradually forms a smarmy smile, then straightens again grimly as he takes note of his boss's warning. That quickly appearing and disappearing smile expresses something both repellent and formidable in Exley's character: pridefulness on a short, taut leash.

Then there is Bud White, described by Exley as a thug. And so he seems to be until we find out that his violence is unleashed mainly in the defense of brutalized women. As a boy, White saw his mother beaten to death by his father and he's been pursuing the old man ever since within the thugs who maltreat women. Bud White the white knight? You may be tempted to think so until he walks into a room where an unarmed suspect is sitting and puts a bullet into him. Playing this psychopathic Galahad, Russell Crowe (another Aussie actor) displays something of Mel Gibson's ticking-bomb tension, but he's reached deeper into himself than Gibson usually goes. Dangling a dishonest witness by his heels outside a high window, White is doing something right out of the Lethal Weapon series, but whereas we know Gibson will soon make a wisecrack and haul the scoundrel in, we're not so sure that White won't actually drop the man, so successful is Crowe in projecting White's abiding dangerousness.

For the role of the silken publicity hound Jack Vincennes, Kevin Spacey provides his reliable brand of feline smugness to which he has this time added a droplet of compassion. While Vincennes chats with a homosexual prostitute who is being used as bait in an extortion deal to which the detective is an accomplice, Spacey, through the subtlest deployment of body language and facial expression, makes us feel Vincennes's initial contempt for the boy turning into pity (and is there the slightest hint of sexual attraction, too, though Vincennes is heterosexual?), a pity that will later spur the detective to avenge the boy's murder.

The excellent screenplay, by Brian Heigeland and director Curtis Hanson out of James Ellroy's novel, is not a detective story that includes rich characterizations as a mere bonus. Rather, the detection itself depends upon the character traits of the detectives and is all too often retarded by their lack of interaction. The central mystery - the slaughter of several people in a restaurant during what seems to be an ordinary robbery - can't be solved at first because the three investigators, each coming to the case from a different angle, detest one another and therefore can't put their partial insights together into one overall solution. Only when each realizes that the honor of his work is worth more than the satisfactions of hatred does the case get solved.

Yet there is a major flaw in the script. Since the theme of mutual parasitism between the police and the media is announced in this movie's title and developed quite well through most of the film (Exley's career is hyped as if he were a rising starlet; Vincennes revels in being technical advisor for a "Dragnet"-like TV show; White comes into contact with a brothel where the whores all resemble movie stars), we expect this theme to inform the solution of the mystery, too. Alas, it doesn't. The secret behind the restaurant slaughter might have served for any conventional police story but proves a letdown for this unconventional one. Compare this with Chinatown, in which the recurring themes of water-theft and incest prove to be at the heart of the mystery.

Director Curtis Hanson's most financially successful movies to date - The Hand that Rocks the Cradle and The River Wild - were expertly wrapped packages containing nothing. Here, inspired by a story of substance, he brings off one memorable moment after another. Such as: Gunfire smashes through a window and kills some gangsters. The bodies of the hoods lie on the floor and there is stillness for a few seconds. And then...slivers of glass fall from the shot-out window frames and tinkle to the floor. The effect would be pretty if the context weren't so ghastly.

In another scene, sardonicism is expertly wedded to pity. As Vincennes comes upon the body of the murdered male prostitute, the camera bears down to a close-up of the youth's still innocent face, and we hear on the sound track a line from a song, "I have grown so much wiser now."

Dante Spinotti's photography doesn't italicize the excellent period details provided by Jeannine Oppewall's production design but concentrates on the faces of the three detectives and the people they encounter. The deliberately sickly lighting encloses them all within a clammy atmosphere. In this movie, even when people aren't sweating, you feel they're sweating inside.