Laurel Canyon

Synopsis: Sam (Christian Bale) and his fiancee Alex (Kate Beckinsale) have both recently graduated from Harvard Medical School and decided to move to Los Angeles to complete their studies. Sam’s mother, Jane (Frances McDormand), a veteran record producer, has offered the use of her house in Laurel Canyon. When the pair arrive, however, Mom is still there finishing off a recording session with a British pop group whose lead singer also happens to be her young lover. Much to Sam’s displeasure, he is thrown back into the lifestyle of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll that he has worked so hard to escape. Even worse, his fiancee seems to find it all a little too attractive.

Although the characters played by Bale and Beckinsale are officially the llead protagonists here, it is Frances McDormand’s portrayal of Jane that captures our attention. Sam and Alex are the fish out of water in her world of Hollywood Hills libertinism. Sam has chosen a respectable career where everything can be measured and explained. It doesn’t take long to realise that much that motivates Sam is based on him not wanting to be like his mother. He has taken it to such an extent that he is shutdown emotionally and sexually. For all his knowledge of human psychology, as we see demonstrated in one scene in the hospital, he can’t see what is going on in his own relationships. Nor can he make other people conform to his wishes. But then it is a truism that whilst we can see where others are going awry, we are all far less perceptive when it comes to ourselves. On the other hand, setting the film in a place with a long-standing reputation for being the preferred haunt for artists and musicians, Cholodenko provides a potent symbol for the kind of limbo in which Jane exists. It’s as if she has been caught in a time warp and it is, for her part, only when the ‘real world’ represented by Sam and Alex enter, that her way of life is brought into question.

In both High Art, her critically-successful first feature, and in this, her second, writer/director Cholodenko sets out to explore, as she puts it, “what’s difficult in relationships; the minutiae of intimacy, the seduction, danger, confusion and relief in it”.  The characters may, for some, seem too illustrative of the director’s agenda, somewhat two-dimensional, but Laurel Canyon is nevertheless, an enjoyable film and the high-point of McDormand’s screen career to date.

 

 

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