PREVIEW
LAUREL CANYON
Starring Frances McDormand, Christian Bale and Kate Beckinsale
Written and directed by Lisa Cholodenko
Opens Friday, May 9
Check listings
In writer-director Lisa Cholodenko’s smart, sexy follow-up to her sterling 1998 debut High Art, two straitlaced young graduates of Harvard Medical School contend with copious amounts of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.
That doesn’t necessarily mean Sam (Christian Bale) and his fiancée Alex (Kate Beckinsale) are in for a good time. For one thing, Sam is all too familiar with walks on the wild side, having spent his life contending with the chaos that surrounds his mother, Jane (Frances McDormand). She’s a record producer who lives on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, a street that runs deep into the Hollywood Hills and past the homes of rock stars, music-biz legends and assorted wastrels who never really checked out of the Hotel California, at least not mentally. When the young couple move into Jane’s house, they are both deeply affected by the libidinous scene.
One of California’s most intrinsically Californian locales, Laurel Canyon is a mythic place that had great resonance with Cholodenko when she was a kid growing up in Los Angeles in the ’70s.
"It’s best represented in Joni Mitchell’s record Ladies of the Canyon," says Cholodenko in a phone interview from her L.A. home.
"I used to drive through the canyon and wonder who lives up there and whether Joni Mitchell still did. I just had my own silly little fantasia about the place that never went away.
"As I got older, it still found its way into my imagination. I remember looking at that Joni Mitchell record again, many years later when I was cutting High Art. I thought, ‘This would be a great opportunity to indulge my fantasy by setting a film against that backdrop and create a character who embodies the spirit of the place.’"
Jane is all that and more. A legendary record producer, she is a refugee from the ’70s, rock ’n’ roll’s most permissive, most excessive era – pictures on the wall of her home show her hanging with Mitchell, David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen. She displays her savvy with her current project, an album by a British band whose expansive sound is meant to evoke Radiohead and Coldplay. (The songs are actually written by Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous and played by a band that includes Folk Implosion’s Lou Barlow – the soundtrack is augmented with appropriately spacious-sounding selections by Mercury Rev and Baxter Dury.)
Jane’s sexual appetite is also undiminished – her new lover is Ian (Alessandro Nivolo), the band’s suave singer. McDormand’s outsized performance of this perennially foxy rock chick gives Cholodenko’s sometimes contrived movie enormous appeal and has already inspired many declarations of love from critics and audiences.
"I think the Frances love was always there, but people were kind of waiting to see her bust out, go into this realm of unbridled femininity and sexuality," says Cholodenko. "She was perfect for it and maybe people were like, ‘Wow, I didn’t know I was looking for it in Frances McDormand but there it is.’"
The director initially thought the role would be a "cakewalk to cast" but soon discovered otherwise. When the film industry slowed down due to fears of strikes in 2001, Cholodenko had more time to "be more liberal about who I met." Although she’d always loved McDormand, Cholodenko didn’t think the Fargo and Almost Famous star would be the right fit.
"But she walked into this meeting just looking like the super fox that she is. That was a glorious moment because I knew we’d be able to make a film at that point. She really wanted to do it and she was the right person to do it. In that meeting, she said, ‘I’ve got a great KISS T-shirt I can bring.’ I thought, ‘How can I top that? What other actress is gonna bring her own KISS T-shirt?’"
Really, all of the leads – especially Bale as Sam, an uptight guy who longs for the stability his mother could never provide and finds himself tempted to have a fling with a fellow medical resident (Natasha McElhone) – bring so much nuance to the film that Laurel Canyon becomes more than a story of hips versus squares. Like High Art, it’s a tale of a charismatic mentor who leads a young woman to places she may not want to go, as well as a portrait of people testing the limits of the relationships they most value. Though Laurel Canyon sometimes plays out like a glossy soap opera set in a terminally cool Californian demimonde, it does have some depth.
"It’s definitely a movie that is going to appeal to people who pay attention to detail," says Cholodenko. "It’s a fun, intriguing movie on that level. There’s sort of a pop-culture thing to it – the soundtrack and milieu are fun and there’s things you can be breezy about.
"But the film feels more substantial to those people who really take a close look at the characters’ psychologies and conundrums. If that stuff breezes by you, it can be a bit of a head-scratch. But if you look at it the other way, it’s very much the opposite." |
Copyright ©2003 FFWD. All rights reserved.