This exclusive CityArts series will chart the recent peculiar releases that failed to get Oscar nominations. Yet, just like the Oscar-nominated fare, these movies are not a part of film culture but exist outside what moviegoers patronize and talk about. The films’ staggered release from December 2011 to early 2012 delays the effects of film on the public. These movies don’t seek popular response; they’re made simply to stroke filmmakers’ egotism.
Rampart is yet another movie that still doesn’t answer the single most unanswered question in the history of film genre: Why does one become a policeman? L.A. cop Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson), known as Date-Rape Dave and Bang-Bang Brown for recklessly killing an innocent rape suspect, is a conceit, not a character. He’s a 24-year vet, hyper intellectual, stud-paterfamilias, juggling ex-wives and two daughters—symbolic of the white male prerogative gone wrong. Yet director Oren Moverman (co-writing with James Ellroy) use the conceit gaudily; their “investigation” continually backs away from the social reality that makes the name “Rampart” a resonant term for urban police corruption from the Ramparts section of L.A. (Curtis Hanson’s film of Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential similarly romanticized and distorted L.A. police history.)
Moverman affects film noir style, which was originally a technological advance meant to portray spiritual conditions through stylized social environments, not obscure or gloss it with visual artifice. Reminiscent of Drive and just as insipid, Rampart appeals to a generation that divorces cinema from social and moral questions. Like Dave Brown, it’s all posturing, without a hint of social consciousness.
Note how Brown goes off when addressing an Internal Affairs panel: “I’d like the event to be judged ad hoc. Empirical knowledge often distorts the content of the act on scrutiny.” His words could well describe a Todd Haynes ploy (Overman scripted Haynes’ I’m Not There): Too much artiness, no relationship to social, historical, political, human reality. Rampart even breaks the Hollywood cop movie traditions that dealt with L.A. corruption, from Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground to Lee Tamahori’s Mulholland Falls and innumerable TV shows in between. Hollywood social consciousness led to (sometimes honest, enlightening) formula. This sub-genre of politically speculative fantasy is a sociological version of sci-fi. Its authenticity resulted in pop art like Charles Burnett’s The Glass Shield and the NWA rap song “F— the Police.”
Ice Cube (star of The Glass Shield and former NWA member) makes a bizarre appearance as an IA investigator, challenging Dave Brown in Cube’s unmistakable truculent drawl. But what’s Cube doing in this gaudy mess, which is less reliable than one of his rap fantasies? It’s sad if Cube thinks Moverman and Ellroy’s apathetic exploitation of urban corruption even comes close to exposing L.A. law enforcement scandals. Not even Cube’s bravado provides insight into why one becomes a cop. The profession is just an opportunity for actors to grandstand. Harrelson plays this melodramatic monstrosity calmly and subtly. His bald virility recalls George C. Scott, but Scott, as in The New Centurions (1972), belonged to an era when filmmakers knew how to write characters.
Moverman and Ellroy only write sociological bluster. The gaudiest is a speech to Cube. Its fatuousness bears repeating: “You got this assignment because I’m controversial and your ancestors were stolen from Africa. You got this assignment to cover the department on perceived racial bias pertaining to Shomwell J. Parley and other shit-faced scum. You’re mad as hell and you want me to know it, but bear in mind that I am not a racist. Fact is I hate all people equally, and if it helps, I’ve slept with some of your people. Now you want to be mad at someone? Try J. Edgar Hoover. He was a racist. Or the founding fathers, all slave owners. Me, I’m just doing my job.”
But the motivations for the job are precisely what Rampart avoids. Its distractions include a sex club orgy scene—the latest in this year’s pretenses like Shame. Brown’s masculinity is tested by interchangeable blonde bots (Anne Heche, Cynthia Nixon, Robin Wright), like the women on Fox News. That’s not Liberal snark, but evidence of what left Liberals and right Conservatives have in common—attitudes so full of self-pity they cannot possibly show empathy, just the same race-smugness that besets The Descendants. The worst is when Brown’s daughter charges, “You’re a classic racist, a bigot, a sexist, a womanizer, a chauvinist, a misanthrope. Homophobic clearly, or maybe you just don’t like yourself!” Fact is, Brown’s just a liar, which Moverman tries inflating to existential proportions. Rampart isn’t critical of police corruption; it simply favors hipster narcissism with a badge.
Follow Armond White on Twitter @3xchair.
[Correction: Lee Tamahori directed Mulholland Falls, not Mulholland Drive. David Lynch directed Mulholland Drive.]
