Trust Your Instincts
Long after you walk away from writer/director Lisa Cholodenko's new film Laurel Canyon, you're left with the sunshine, nostalgia and sweet heartache of the movie's songs: catchy pop for a catchy movie, whose characters surface often in your memory to repeat their best lines and put on their best faces. Record producer Jane (a top-drawer performance from Frances McDormand) tells her son's girlfriend Alex (Kate Beckinsale) that anyone with instincts can understand pop music, and the same could be said of the film - instinctively, we find ourselves liking the characters (and particularly their precarious coexistence), maybe because we don't have to absorb ourselves in them beyond the moment, or feel overly harrowed by their dilemmas. Like the soundtrack's best tunes - from the likes of Steely Dan, Clinic, Serge Gainsbourg, among others - the characters are finely crafted, and they work for us in the present tense.

A Tale of Two Coasts
Cholodenko gives us a pretty standard story of dichotimies - geographical, cultural, psychological. First we have Sam (Christian Bale) and Alex, two postgrads conditioned to a serious, tempered existence in Cambridge, Mass. They're headed west so Sam can accept a position as a psychiatry resident at a Los Angeles clinic. While in California, they're staying in the house of Sam's record-producer mother Jane, who lives in the upper-crust artists' enclave that gives the movie its name. They expect an empty house but instead find Jane at home, working (and playing) with a young British band as they try to squeeze a hit single out of the record she's producing. When we first meet the LA gang, they've wrapped a hard day in the studio and are unwinding with Steely Dan and a bong.

Ripe comedy resides in the juxtaposition between two vastly different cultures and personality types. Sam and Alex are scholars committed to their work and each other, to a dignified life of decorum that Sam, for one, has erected to give his days a structure his mother's never had. He has always detested her hedonism and apparent lack of responsibility, and when warning Alex about her, Sam goes so far as to describe Jane as "developmentally disabled." "You make her sound autistic," Alex says. "Well," he counters, "in a way, she is."

So imagine Sam's consternation when they arrive at the house and are forced to inhabit the world of Jane and her young rock-singer boyfriend Ian (Alessandro Nivola nails the performance) and his merry band of British mates. Jane's a 40-something record producer, Ian's the impossibly charming rogue who is intelligent, perceptive and dangerously free of any sense of obligation. He and Jane are of a similar makeup - both fiercely individualistic, nursing romantic impulses while at the same time strutting cocksure through a world that requires a fair degree of posing. But who's putting on more of an act here? Much of the pleasure in Laurel Canyon is learning that the folks in the entertainment business might be truer to themselves than the repressed Sam and Alex.

The film becomes a movie of curiosities: Alex with the rock music world; then, later, a triangle of curiosity (or attraction, rather) arises between her, Jane and Ian. Sam and a fellow resident named Sara (Natasha McElhone) are curious about each other too, though in what seems a much more conforming, restrained way. (Sublimation, Sam's catchword, rules their relationship.) The only two people who don't seem curious about each other are Sam and Alex, which is an issue they might want to confront before actually getting married.

All fun and games, 'till you make out with your future mother-in-law.
Maybe someday they'll thank Ian for exposing their creeping dysfunction. As beautifully as McDormand portrays Jane - her acute verbal jousts backhand others in the face; her quizzically pursed lips and dimpled chin suggest constant skepticism of her surroundings, even as she indulges in all the pleasures before her - Nivola's Ian is the funniest and most seductive presence. He carries on a constant flirtation with Alex that goes from charming to wolfish as she peeks deeper into the looking glass of their world. He lures her into a three-way makeout session with Jane in a swimming pool (either an advertisement for, or warning against, the consumption of whiskey sours), and, as the film shimmies toward its emotional climax, he encourages Alex's striptease to the senusously winding strings of Gainsbourg's tune "Bonnie and Clyde," following a party in a hotel suite.

Amazing how fast reality kills a mood when a good song reaches its end. In the aftermath of that scene, when Sam arrives and the moment of reckoning comes, both Alex and Jane are quick to take responsibility for the mess. Ian's reply? "Well, it's not my fucking fault!" Perfectly delivered, drawing one of the biggest laughs of the film, the line sums up the confounding question on everyone's mind: How the hell did we get here? And how do we live with ourselves afterward?

Clearly there are some tears and recriminations coming, but to Cholodenko's credit, she doesn't create any facile resolution for the confusion her characters - particularly Alex and Sam - are feeling. Maybe that's because there isn't any obvious exit. These relationships (and here we can't exclude Sam's bond with Jane) will endure in the calm of forgiveness, but forgiving is hardly the same as forgetting.

So why do we feel so comfortable, at ease, when the closing credits roll? Could be the LA scenery, grainy and washed in sunlight, or the comfort of the scruffy ballad that starts playing, or the laughs that bring levity to the sharper moments of conflict. In any case, the rifts between characters and within themselves will prove fleeting in your head. If love can't conquer all, at least a love song can.