Harrelson breaks bad in blue

I love me some LA noir, whether it’s James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential, Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, or TV’s pretty-boy noir, Southland, I grew up on the mean sidewalks of West LA – or at least I went to nursery school there.

That may be one reason that I’m so completely taken with Rampart, a name that refers to one of Los Angeles’ most notoriously corrupt police departments, blue-walled home to scandal and Training Day and Adam-12. Add to that that Ellroy himself created the story and co-wrote the script with director Oren Moverman (The Messenger), and we’ve got a ticket to hard-boiled bloody bliss.

And then there’s Woody Harrelson as Dave Brown, a second generation policeman in the Rampart Division who rides his cop car like a Marlboro man, smoking, drinking, never eating.  For him, Downtown LA is the frontier; he even gets out of his car as if he were climbing off a saddle into the muck. His moniker is “Date Rape.” He doesn’t go gentle through the night with perps, a practice that has now put his position on the force in peril. His jaw juts and his shades cover nearly dead eyes. Yes, he could be a character out of a Jim Thompson novel, The Killer Inside Me.

Where does Harrelson stop and Brown begin? This self-made son of a murderer has always had something dangerous he was covering with humor and once-good looks, now funneled into a physique free of body fat. People forget that cigarettes and uppers have always been a successful weight-loss one-two punch. This is an Oscar contender performance because he owns every inch of the screen — he is the movie’s muscle and bone. And, yet, Harrelson never acts alone. He’s always hardwired to the actors with whom he shares his scenes. This is as true of his violence against citizens, as it is of his multiple sex scenes. I can still see him licking the toe of a brown woman he picked up at a bar like it was a chicken wing.

And that’s where the twist comes in. The dirty cop story is conventional in its own way: the times are changing and a violent cop is not changing with them. The frontier is shrinking and there’s no place left for the bigger-than-life cowboy. As for Brown, he’s covered up a killing in the past that always threatens to come unburied. He’s brutalized a man on a tape that went viral, and which he cannot explain away. No context justifies the violence. And yet….

Here’s the magnificent twist: Brown’s strange domestic harem. He lives with two sisters in adjacent small stucco houses: his current wife (Cynthia Nixon) and his ex (Anne Heche) and his two daughters, rebellious Helen (Brie Larson) and pliable Margaret (Sammy Boyarsky). OK, she’s my sister, she’s my cousin, she’s my sister, she’s my cousin. It’s a messy menage, an estrogen den, and all four woman flower as fully-realized characters. Nixon has rarely been better on screen: sharp, sensible and maternal. Heche dishes out her anger in a way that would bring down the cops for domestic violence, if a cop wasn’t already involved. Larson, as Brown’s angry, lesbian teenager, burns through her scenes, so desperately wanting to love her father, so angry with having to deal with the fall-out from his failures. They’re freakish twins, which makes the ending work so completely.

Then there’s Robin Wright not Penn as his boozy, damaged lawyer on the side. She’s an actress who can convey so many things with a face that seems impassive, a mask of beauty now aging gracefully, a princess who’s seen more than Camelot. And Ben Foster reunites with Harrelson and Moverman, in a supporting role as a wheelchair bound street vet that’s gut-wrenching and sly.

For me, beyond Moverman’s confident ability to drive the story along with his sharp-shooting camera, and Ellroy’s sure-footed we-know-men script, is a realization of the complicated messiness of life. While the LA law enforcement landscape is changing, and Brown’s two-fisted cop is no longer welcome, we’ve seen that story before, even if this is a terrific example of the trope. The real frontier that’s changed is the relationship between men and women. Brown is clearly a lover of women, which makes his character so full and flawed. Brown’s personal tragedy is that he’s revealed to be as much a dinosaur in his domestic life as the Marlboro Man has become as a proud symbol of American masculinity.