Word: exley
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...movie, you suddenly realize that people are creeping from one closed space to the next, from the Christmastime police beatings in prison cells onward. Into such a world populated by officers who would just as soon as bury a broken bottle in your neck as arrest you, Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) enters, a fresh-scrubbed "golden boy" with an absolute commitment to good. Exley is a little uncomfortable with the corner-cutting approach of the police chief Dudley Smith (James Cromwell), who dispenses tips on life with a thin smile that promises something violently wrong is happening somewhere. Smith would...
...engrossing enough to watch this twoheaded beast of a police force at work, which is what Hanson lets us do for a bit, before the appropriately twisty plot really gets under way. The story itself is impeccably paced, a well-orchestrated series of cover-ups and discoveries, as Exley skillfully and stubbornly cuts his way through the many layers of the blue shield and those who profit by it (like a man who runs a service of call girls cut to resemble movie starlets). Surprises and not so teensy-weensy ethical decisions are sprinkled throughout as we wonder whether Exley...
...technical adviser to a Dragnet-like TV show and is becoming a celebrity in his own right; Bud White (Australian actor Russell Crowe), who's a sweet, plodding sort of guy unless someone visits violence on women, which turns him into a raging brute; and Ed Exley (Guy Pearce, another Aussie), the departmental priss and spoilsport, thoroughly despised by everyone, as moral centers of amoral enterprises should be--until they turn out to have been right all along...
Both, as it turned out, and the Washington Post book critic and columnist Jonathan Yardley engagingly examines this double identity in Misfit: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley (Random House; 255 pages; $23). Yardley makes no inflated claims on behalf of his subject: "Fred was a professional writer, although only one of his three books [A Fan's Notes] will long remain in print." But Exley (1929-1992) intensely interested and exasperated his readers, relatives, friends, casual acquaintances and the victims of his odd-hours telephone monologues, among whom Yardley and this reviewer number themselves. "What a piece of work...
...work, mostly, although Yardley renders this verdict gently. A normal boy growing up in Watertown, N.Y., Exley took some hits during his senior year in high school--the death of his football-hero father, an auto accident that ended his own dreams of gridiron glory--and, after majoring in English at the University of Southern California, eventually became a charming monster of self-indulgence. Women, beginning with his mother, lined up to mother him. He had two wives and physically abused them both. He drank incessantly: "There are people who knew him for years and never, to their knowledge...