RIP Curtis Hanson

Earlier this month, the director Curtis Hanson passed away. Hanson was a successful director who worked steadily and helmed several A-list projects, but never really achieved household name status. People look for the next Spielberg or Tarantino picture, but rarely was anyone clamoring for the next Hanson project. It’s almost a guarantee you’ve seen some of his films even if you don’t know who Curtis Hanson is.

After a couple of decades of mostly forgettable projects, Hanson hit a hot streak of financially successful and critically acclaimed movies beginning in the early 90s with the schlocky thriller, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle with Rebecca DeMornay as a vengeful, unhinged nanny preying on an unsuspecting family.

The success of that film led him to the director’s chair of 1994’s The River Wild with Meryl Streep as a whitewater river guide and Kevin Bacon as the sleazy convict who forces her into helping him and his partner make an escape.

In 2000, Hanson directed a lovely literary adaptation of Michael Chabon’s wonderful comic novel, Wonder Boys. Michael Douglas turned in one of his best performances in years as a washed up English professor dealing with the results of a chain of his own catastrophic decisions. It featured Frances McDormand, Tobey Maguire, and a pre-Iron Man Robert Downey Jr. in full motor-mouth mode as a literary agent.

Making a sharp U-turn from the antics of Ivy League professors, Hanson then directed Michigan’s own Eminem in 8 Mile, the fictionalized story of Slim Shady’s early days as a scrappy white rapper vying for attention and accolades in the heart of Detroit. 

Smack in the middle of this auspicious run of varied and successful films is Hanson’s best and my favorite of all his work, 1997’s L.A. Confidential.  Adapted from James Elroy’s massive novel of the same name, it’s set in 1950s Los Angeles during the height of the Hollywood dream factory. It’s a story of corruption and greed that involves crooked cops, wannabe actors, muckraking reporters, drugs, prostitution, and murder. Along with screenwriter Brian Helgeland, Hanson turned the sprawling source novel into one of the best literary adaptations on film. They rightfully won an Oscar for it. 

The film has a Rolls Royce ensemble cast with eclectic but perfectly cast pros from top to bottom. Kim Basingner also won an Oscar for her portrayal as Lynn, the Veronica Lake lookalike prostitute, but it’s Guy Pearce, Kevin Spacey, and Russell Crowe in a star-making turn who really drive the picture. Each man plays a member of the corrupt and violent LAPD but each comes from a different point of view. Crowe was a relative unknown before his portrayal as the brutal but smarter-than-he-looks Officer Bud White, and he has since credited L.A. Confidential and Curtis Hanson with giving him a Hollywood career. (Having said that, I don’t think we can blame Hanson for Crowe’s performance in Les Miserables. I think he needs to take the rap for that himself.) Guy Pearce’s role as the ambitious but naïve Edmund Exley should have gotten more attention than it did as it is a masterclass in subtle but powerful character development.

The film, while brutal and profane at times, is tremendously entertaining – it’s smart, fun, and thrilling. And even though the movie is soaked in perfect period detail, it’s never distracting. The story is visceral and feels contemporary even though the events take place over half a century ago.

A director is responsible for bringing together and managing all the elements of a film. Ultimately, that’s why he or she gets the majority of the credit or the blame for a picture’s success or lack thereof. In the case of L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson brought together the exact right elements and managed them to perfection to produce a truly great movie that stands as a testament to the departed director’s talent and taste.