Laurel Canyon
review by Nicholas Schager, 7 March 2003

There’s no shortage of sex, drugs, and rock and roll in Lisa Cholodenko’s Laurel Canyon, but one wishes there were a few less yuppies. Christian Bale and Kate Beckinsale star as Sam and Alex, an intellectual couple of recent Harvard Medical School graduates with no sexual, romantic, or social life. Despite the protestations of Alex’s father, the two abandon their East Coast residence to complete their studies in California while staying at the supposedly vacant home of Sam’s counterculture record producer mom Jane (Frances McDormand). However, when they arrive, Jane is still holed up in her house trying to complete a record with a wild British band whose lead singer, Ian (Alessandro Nivola), is also her lover du jour. Sam and Jane are like oil and water, and it’s not long before we recognize Laurel Canyon to be a film about time-worn clashes: between mother and son, preppie and hippie.

Complicating Sam’s homecoming are two formidable obstacles: Alex actually likes Jane’s devil-may-care lifestyle, and Sam’s beautiful Israeli co-worker Sara (Natascha McElhone) has taken a (not unreciprocated) liking to him. Writer/director Cholodenko, as in her debut High Art, is fascinated by the ways in which happy relationships become complicated. If only Laurel Canyon didn’t feel so painfully obvious and programmed from the get-go. As Alex is seduced by both Jane and Ian (whose passionate love affair is the opposite of hers and Sam’s), Sam finds himself drawn to the enticing Sara, but the drama elicited from these shenanigans is painfully rote and predictable. When Cholodenko has Alex and Sam awkwardly fail to have sex while Jane and Ian’s screams of ecstasy are heard reverberating through the house, it’s a sign that there’s very little originality or surprise left in Laurel Canyon.

Will both Sam and Alex learn something about themselves and each other, and find a way to make their relationship work? Will Sam ever accept his Mom, faults and all, for the loving woman that she really is? Will Jane ever grow up? You won’t have to hold your breath for the answers, since they’re deduced easily enough from the film’s first fifteen minutes. Yet if the liberal-conservative conflict at the heart of the story – also embodied in Jane’s battles with the commerce-first record label, who wants the band’s album finished in time for Christmas so that it can “move more units” – is disappointingly uninspired, the film at least benefits from the chemistry of its almost uniformly excellent cast. As Jane, McDormand, with blond highlights and decked out in a variety of skin tight faded blue jeans and band T-shirts, gets her juiciest role in years, and her relationship with Nivola’s rakish, smoldering Ian sizzles. Jane is introduced while smoking a bong, and her uninhibited penchant for nudity, cursing, and bisexuality is complemented by a tinge of regret over having put her wild life before her son’s. McDormand has a devilishly good time playing Jane, and it’s a testament to her performance’s casual artlessness that Jane doesn’t disintegrate into a caricature of peace-and-love slackers.

Similarly, Bale and Beckinsale feel right at home with each other, although their easy rapport might have something to do with the fact that both foreign actors (Bale is Welsh, Beckinsale English) sport similarly distracting American accents for the film. But while Beckinsale’s Alex is allowed to branch out from her stultifying bookish life, Bale is saddled with the thankless role of perpetually repressed dork with a conscience. It’s one thing for Cholodenko to split the world into two camps – artistic cool people and academic losers – and another thing entirely to saddle your lead actor with a nerdy haircut, sub-J. Crew outfit, and little to do except look dry and constipated every time he gets near his mom’s rowdy friends. Even Bale’s best scenes, involving his parent-sibling bickering with McDormand, are few and far between, scattered among too many sequences of Sam acting petulant or emotionally remote. Of course, I dare any actor to elicit sympathy when his character’s biggest dilemma is whether to choose between Kate Beckinsale and Natascha McElhone. One wishes Sam would just smoke some grass, take a look at his charmed life, and stop complaining.

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