The thing that made L.A. Confidential great for me is just that the three leads are so complicated, realistic, morally ambiguous, and are so wonderfully played.
Ed Exley. He has ironclad integrity - or does he? Is his integrity just a cover-up for his ambition? Does he even know? Right before the climax, he makes us think he’s made a final choice between his career and his moral values - but he hasn’t, really, as we learn at the end when he’s being debriefed. And even though he plays by the rules, he is competent, which is the exact reverse of the standard cop-movie cliche that only the rules-breakers can ever get anything done. Watch him in his interrogation scene, and shudder. The guy knows what he’s doing.
Bud White. Crowe does a magnificent job with this guy. Note that while most of his lines are in a terse monotone, his physical movements show the anger and violence he is always struggling to control. This is a perfect setup for the scene with Lynn Bracken; it is the only time in the movie that White lets his emotions show in his voice, which underscores how broken up he is. This is a man who believes he has the right to take the law into his own hands - and by doing so, he sometimes really does defend people that the law cannot or will not defend. But at other times, he also functions as a professional torturer for his corrupt police chief. In almost all movies, this kind of “maverick” cop is portrayed from only one side; either all his actions redound to the good, or they are all bad. In this movie, they are both.
Jack Vincennes. This character is a beautiful picture of a guy who has dived into a well of cynicism and found it too cold for his liking. He admits that he’s forgotten why he became a cop, but you know that he would like to remember. “I doubt you’ve ever taken a stupid breath,” Dudley tells Vincennes, and that’s clearly true, but you can also see that Vincennes has rarely taken a happy breath either. Spacey is just superb. That wonderful, irony-edged way he delivers the final word in the sentence, “Why in the world do you want to go digging any deeper into the Nite Owl killings, Lieutenant?” slays me. Or when he is talking with Dudley in Dudley’s home, he delivers his lines with the same uncertainty as if he really is making them up on the spot; you can tell he hasn’t actually done this in a long while.
These are three fascinating people, people we may have been shown before on the screen, but never had the opportunity to meet and get to know so well. (And the Academy ignores all three of them and gives the Oscar to Basinger? Go figure). This is one of the rare cop movies that give you cops you can believe in and care about.
That said, I think L.A. Confidential is lionized only partly because its characters are so good, or for any other merit of its own. A lot of people who otherwise wouldn’t have cared less about it raved about the movie just because they hated Titanic. Blah, I say. They’re very different movies, but both good in their own way.