Laurel Canyon

I had high hopes for this film, expecting something of an insight into the world represented by Ladies Of The Canyon (Joni Mitchell's album was apparently the inspiration for the film's writer and director Lisa Cholodenko). The story's premise is the transplantation of uptight, over-intellectual hung-up east-coast Sam and Alex into the free-lovin', pot-smokin', laid-back west-coast household of Jane, Sam's mother. There's an immediate tension: Sam is a psychiatrist, Alex is finishing her dissertation on the sex lives of fruit flies (no, really) and Jane is a record producer with a bad-boy English rock singer lover called Ian (somehow that doesn't sound like an appropriate name for a bad-boy English rock singer).

While Sam tries to get to grips with his new job and deal with the attentions of a sexy colleague equipped with a pair of unreasonably large doe-like eyes, Alex taps away on her computer and peers at molecular models until, one day, the intriguing sounds of the tracks being laid down by Ian's band under Jane's direction become just too irresistible. And then... but you can probably guess what happens after that. It's not a bad story, but somehow I didn't really believe in it, or connect to the characters. Christian Bale and Kate Beckinsale play Sam and Alex as so buttoned-down for so long that any displays of extreme emotion appear inauthentic, and the change in their relationship seems implausible. Frances McDormand's idiosyncratic performance as Jane is more interesting, but I couldn't really see why she'd be wasting her time with such a self-serving twit as Ian.

In what was probably a sure sign that I wasn't paying enough attention, I found myself wondering about the time taken for the American actor playing Ian to fashion an English accent, and whether he'd met Bale and Beckinsale travelling in the opposite direction in their quest to speak American. And when I wasn't thinking about that, I was admiring the interior of Jane's bohemian house, and the lovely views of the eponymous canyon. Perhaps it'd've been a better film without the people in it.

I love this movie - saw it 3 times now and it's as good or even better than the first time. Only weakness is Natascha McElhone who to my mind is a silly actress - she has only one look: opens her eyes wide and give a supposedly seductive smile (she does it all the time in Californication where she's also badly casted) and her accent is pretty awful. Luckily we don't see much of her. The other leads are great, especially Frances McDormand.

So terribly boring. Story seems to be a lightly structured excuse for good actors to "expreess" their characters. These characters are one dimensional, and have the feel that they being given the space to develop their roles-it all seems like an experiment, with the actors all seeming like they've just left acting school and trying to impress each other with the grasp they have of their role. The cast are to a person unbelievable, their actions and motivations highly questionable; for instance, the young jogger who buys pizza & smokes and joins in a threesome with her partner's mother & boyfriend all too slavishly to allow the "plot" to move on. I couldn't wait for the end of this film, which finished predictably with a non conclusive scene. There are so many better films to watch than this sel indulgent waste of time.