Site Presented By
Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Driven by the marvelously sexy Frances McDormand, "Laurel Canyon" is wreathed in a golden haze of rock 'n' roll sensuality and glorious L.A. sunlight.
Mar 7, 2003 | In Steven Soderbergh's "The Limey," a beautiful young woman says to her boyfriend, a rich, aging '60s hotshot -- played with perfect desiccated glamour by Peter Fonda -- "You're not a person; you're more like a vibe." Writer-director Lisa Cholodenko's "Laurel Canyon" may be more a vibe than a movie. And that's precisely its power.
In some ways "Laurel Canyon" feels more attuned to the laws of music than the laws of movies: Cholodenko is interested in her characters first and foremost, but the spaces between them are a close second. And how do you film spaces? Cholodenko and her actors pull it off; the performances here are like a wary ballet, ruled as much by the mysterious magnetic attractions and repulsions these characters feel for one another as by anything so dully explicable as psychology or standard rules of social conduct. In "Laurel Canyon," the beats between the notes are as crucial as the notes themselves.
Frances McDormand plays Jane, a longtime record producer in her mid-40s who still lives some semblance of the life she lived in the late '60s and early '70s. She smokes pot, she drinks, she hangs out with (and sleeps with) beautiful young rock stars, among them her current flame Ian (Alessandro Nivola), the lead singer of the English rock band she's trying to break in the States. She's supposed to have finished work on the band's album before her straight-arrow psychiatrist-in-training son, Sam (Christian Bale), is to arrive at her Laurel Canyon home with his fiancée and fellow academic, Alex (Kate Beckinsale).
Sam is attending a training program for psychiatrists; Alex is working on her thesis (some genetic business involving fruit flies). Jane has told them they can stay at her house, which she has promised will be vacant by the time they get there -- that's crucial to Sam, who seems to love his mother but has little patience for what he sees as her disorderly and unfocused lifestyle.
"Laurel Canyon"
Written and directed by Lisa Cholodenko
Starring Frances McDormand, Christian Bale, Kate Beckinsale, Alessandro Nivola, Natascha McElhone
But Jane's unfinished work means she can't leave, and so she, Sam, Alex and Ian settle into an uneasy cohabitation as the rhythms of the household shift and change around and between them. "Laurel Canyon" is primarily about sex, although not in the most obvious way. The shy, quiet Alex, who at first thinks she's perfectly happy holed up in her room going through reams of fruit-fly data on her computer, realizes that she likes hanging out in the studio with Jane and the band.
Beckinsale works the transformation convincingly, simply by showing it's not a transformation at all. She's not your typical straight girl aching to go wild, but, rather, a serious girl who suddenly recognizes that her sensible, sterling character doesn't preclude sexual adventurousness -- particularly given that Sam, whom she loves and thinks she's happy with, treats sex as if it were something of an obligation.
At least sex with her, that is. Sam is more stolidly serious than Alex is, about his work and the stringently planned configuration of his life; that's obviously a reaction to his mother's highly annoying free-spiritedness. Sam is so straight that he's almost unlikable, and Bale, always a wonderful actor, plays him so he brings us just to the point of impatience with him. But it's evidence of Cholodenko's love and compassion for her characters that Sam is never made out to be the villain.
As narrow as Sam seems to be about sex, he can't resist the burgeoning attraction he feels for a fellow resident at the hospital, a lush, brainy Israeli doctor-in-training named Sara (played by the magnificently doe-eyed Natascha McElhone). Together they have one of the best and most delicate scenes in the movie, one that suggests that the possibility of connection (sexual and otherwise) is still wholly open to Sam, even though he seems to rail against "connection" as a false, airy '60s construct. It's the movie's most sensual scene, although the two of them do nothing more than talk.
