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Laurel Canyon (2002)
One of the hardest things in life is bringing the person you have fallen in love with home to meet your family. Life can become massively complicated if they don't get along. Worse, your parents may not be the most impressive of individuals, causing you to worry that your new love may take a poorer view of you from having met them. Laurel Canyon is about that very situation.
Sam (Christian Bale) and Alex (Kate Beckinsale) are a young couple planning to marry. She is working on her dissertation about the sex life of fruit flies for her PhD. He has been offered an internship at a prestigious hospital in California working in a mental ward. The plan is for them to move from Boston into his mother's place in area known as Laurel Canyon, which she isn't using. Unfortunately, when they get there, she actually is living there. Jane (Frances McDormand) is a record producer and is currently working with a British band on a new album in the recording studio in her house. The lead singer Ian (Alessandro Nivola) is sharing her bed. The whole operation is there because she broke up with her latest boyfriend and felt guilty enough about it to leave him her beach house that they had been staying in.
So now they all have to stay in the same house. This is a bit of a problem for Sam, as he is fatally embarrassed by his mother's behavior. Alex is as straight laced as they come and he knows his mother's wild life will eventually reflect badly on him. What he doesn't see coming is Alex's fascination with Jane and her life. This leads to her smoking pot, sitting in on recording sessions and generally letting her hair down and living life for a change. At the same time Sam is pursued aggressively at work by Sara (Natascha McElhone), who can't wait to get him into bed. He tries not to be enticed but she's gorgeous and relentless and well you know how these things go. You have to give his character credit; he doesn't immediately start shredding her clothing in a desperate attempt to have sex with her before she figures out how dull he really is. Instead he actually tries to remain faithful to Alex. This is of course a mistake, as Alex has long known how dull Sam was but didn't care because she was dull too. But now she has met Ian and Jane and is well down the road to debauchery.
If you can't yet tell, the main problem with the movie is the script. While it features some great dialogue and one-liners, it stumbles over itself trying to make something out of Sam and Alex's troubled relationship. The problems in that relationship are so painfully obvious that their failure to attend to them generates considerable apathy to the characters. I really couldn't work up much concern on way or the other towards the possibility of the relationship failing. If they slept around or stayed together, it made no difference to me. There simply wasn't a foundation to build interest or concern on.
There is one reason to see this movie and it is Frances McDormand. She has proven again and again to be one of the most talented and wide ranging film actresses working today. Countless times her performance in a film has stood out, elevating a film to a higher level. Fargo, Blood Simple and Almost Famous are just a few such films. Here again, she elevates a film with her presence. Jane is a woman approaching fifty who easily draws attention more readily than the younger more classically beautiful Alex. Jane has confidence to spare and it shows in her relaxation in a vicious business occupied by artists and accountants. She lives life to the fullest and never regrets a moment. McDormand seems to effortlessly convey all this. Whenever she's on screen it's easy to forget the clunkiness of the script because she's so damned good she could be reading off a menu and still make it fascinating.
Alessandro Nivola has far less screen time but he makes the best of it as a singer who is equal parts lazy musician and charming sexual predator. Nivola deserves a lot of credit for making Ian's total lack of self-awareness charming. Bale, Beckinsale and McElhone all do solid work but are so handcuffed by the machinations of the script we're hard pressed to much interested in the characters. Sam is so uptight and angry with his mother that he makes a convincing case for pot use. Some people just need to lighten up. Alex is pure vanilla. She's pretty but seems to have almost no personality. It's hard to believe anyone in the story takes an interest in her unrelated to her looks. McElhone is sexy as hell but exists only as a plot device. Whether or no she lured Sam into bed was of interest to me only in terms of how hot the ensuing sex scene might be. Emotionally, nothing.
I can mildly recommend the movie on the strength of McDormand's performance alone. Nivola adds some additional interest but after that it's a tough sell. I enjoyed watching the movie apart from nagging annoyances with the script but when thinking it over days later for the purposes of writing the review, I found only the performances by McDormand and Nivola made any lasting impact in my memories. Like many movies, it has a few fun elements and some utterly forgettable stuff.
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