Games people play: 'Laurel Canyon' & "Bend It Like Beckham'

Commonweal, May 9, 2003 by Richard Alleva

What's the best way of rebelling against your parents when they happen to belong to a minority? By joining the majority, of course. Consider two new movies that show what happens when a whelp from an enclave merges with the masses.

Laurel Canyon is the name and setting of Lisa Cholodenko's second feature (I missed her first, the much-praised High Art). Helicopter shots sprinkled throughout the action keep reminding us that the locale, scooped out of rolling hillsides, is a bit of Californian paradise bordering on hell--an L.A. freeway. So the canyon provides an oasis from hurly burly? Not for the people inside the house where Cholodenko takes us. They include British and American rock musicians making a CD under the earth-mothering supervision of the house's owner, Jane, a fortyish, bisexual record producer dedicated to hard work, hard loving, and hard partying. Also, Jane's son, Sam, and his fiancee, Alex, who were promised the house as a waystation between Harvard Medical School and the launching of their careers. The CD refuses to gel, the musicians won't move out until it does, so...welcome to the spare bedroom on the second floor, kids, and please don't mind the electric guitars wailing twelve hours a day and the fact that we party till dawn in the swimming pool just below your windows, even though Sam has to get up at 5:30 a.m. to hie himself to the psychiatric ward where he is interning.

"She's always been like this," snarls Sam. The rockers may be potheads and orgiasts but Sam is the real rebel of the movie. Against Mom. Against Mom's bohemia. Against disorder, laxness, neurosis, squalor, and everything else Mom stands for in Sam's mind. So it's off to the hospital every morning to learn how to heal shattered psyches, but back every night to a bedroom throbbed by rock music, scented by the aroma of marijuana, and invaded by the noises of his mother having rough sex with lead singer Ian at the other end of the corridor. As if all that weren't enough, Sam at work keeps noticing the luminescent eyes and high cheekbones of the beautiful second-year intern from Israel, while Alex, left behind in Laurel Canyon to type her Ph.D. thesis on the sex life of fruitflies, soon finds herself drawn to the sex life of rock 'n' rollers. In fact, an orgy a trois with Ian and her own prospective mother-in-law seems to be in the offing for the bride-to-be. Poor Sam.

Conformists mewed with bohemians. Refinement besieged by the raffish. Aren't we talking about screwball comedy here? And doesn't Alex distracted from her fruit flies, call to mind the lab-coated, bespectacled Cary Grant of Bringing Up Baby, distracted from his dinosaur bones by the lovelier bones of Kate Hepburn?

Alas, the resemblance never entered Cholodenko's mind. Laurel Canyon has its genial moments and is never as solemn as its betrothed academics, but it belongs to the same genre being currently traversed by 90 percent of today's American Indie filmmakers and by many foreign artists as well: psychodrama.

Either on stage or on screen, a psychodrama's plot exists mainly to provide an excuse for five or six scenes in which characters sit on couches, around kitchen tables, or in restaurant booths, staring into one another's eyes, while whispering, muttering, screaming or flatly stating home truths. Everything hinges on who did what to whom and who is to blame for the speaker's emotional pain. The past is dredged up, summed up, poked at, denied, admitted, spat out, sighed over, forgiven, digested, surmounted. Secrets and Lies, Jungle Fever, Magnolia, Interiors, and all of John Cassavetes's films except Gloria, are film examples of psychodrama. Stage examples are legion, notably the greatest American play of them all, Long Day's Journey into Night, so obviously I intend no sweeping indictment. Even if it seems more influenced by Arthur (Primal Scream) Janov than Ibsen or D. W. Griffith, psychodrama is indeed drama since it comprises conflict, confrontations, climaxes, and resolutions. However, the defects of the genre glare. There is very little pleasure in storytelling qua storytelling. Since all the power of psychodrama resides in the human face and voice, the physical world is scanted and this limits the visual aspects of the moviemaking. Worst of all, the characters tend to be scab-scratching crybabies instead of interesting strivers toward compelling goals.

All this is true of Laurel Canyon. Its storytelling is perfunctory, since the initial setup is factitious (Jane, a well-connected show-biz artist/businesswoman really couldn't find a friend with whom to board the youngsters?) and the plot wends its weary, meandering way to the predestined orgy confrontation. The direction and cinematography make us feel vividly the itchy claustrophobia of the fiancees trapped in their bedroom, but we never get a solid sense of the entire house, the surrounding countryside, or the ugliness of the freeway. There is no feeling for the details or atmosphere of work, neither the way a psychiatric ward functions nor the way a rock band creates.