I got to see the movie made from James Ellroy's first novel,
BROWN'S REQUIEM, last night. Michael Rooker plays Fritz
Brown. The movie is about as close to the book as one could
ask of a 97 minute movie. A lot of the schmaltzy aspects of
Brown in the book are eliminated in the movie. His obsession
with classical music, for instance, is referred to but not
elucidated. He does not have sex with Jane Baker, played by
Selma Blair in a thankless role. Jane Baker is Brown's
catalyst in the book, but she's rather incidental to the
movie. I thought that this strengthened Brown's character. In
both the book and the movie, Brown is a brutal character full
of anger and violence mitigated only by his alcoholism and
quixotic love of classical music. Rooker plays him as a man
warring with his alcoholism more successfully than Ellroy's
character. The sentimentality that so undermines the Ellroy
Brown is nearly eviscerated from Rooker's creation. The
brutality of the torture scene when Brown confronts Ralston
really brought home for me what the book suggests. The
casting especially of Fat Dog and Kupferman was spot on in
terms of my vision of those characters. The casting of Walter
was less satisfying. I thought Ellroy would have improved the
book had he cut that character out of it. I don't know why
they kept him in the movie. He accomplishes nothing for the
plot, but make Brown slightly more human. All that does, in
my opinion, is confuse Brown's motives.
This is a hard boiled film that is also noir. If anything
good happens to any of these characters it will represent a
major shift in fate. The novel has a much warmer sense of the
end with Jane's letter. The movie drops off, which I think
makes for a more realistic story.
This was Ellroy's first novel and an excellent first novel,
too. It's starts themes he picked up on in later work. It's
also sparsely written in a normal voice. It is somewhat
indulgent of Ellroy's own experience in terms of life around
a golf course, right-wing politics, and classical music. He
perhaps takes some of those ideas a little further than they
need to go to color the story. The corrupt LA police force
and the exact nature of the corruption is well described in
the book. The movie follows the plot closely. A few major
characters are demoted and some scenes of violence are
inserted to move the plot faster than Ellroy's interesting
but more cerebral detective work. There's at least one cameo
that came as a surprise to me.
If you've read this book, you'll probably find this movie
interesting. If you haven't read the book, this is a brutal
combination of hard boiled and noir that can stand on it's
own.
Patrick King
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