Premiere.com
Stories about overprivileged, overeducated, sexually attractive white people in the United States are difficult to praise. Why should anyone care about these folks? They have what everyone else ought to have or wants. Lisa Cholodenko, the writer-director of the revelatory High Art, is apparently undaunted by this moral stance. Her second effort, Laurel Canyon, is a poshly bohemian dramedy of manners, which follows the sexual foibles of five characters-a psychiatrist fresh out of Harvard, played by Christian Bale; his fiancee, a brilliant, uptight doctoral candidate, played by Kate Beckinsale; the psychiatrist's mother, a fiercely self-involved, bisexual record producer, played by Frances McDormand; the seductive lead singer of a rock band she's producing, played by Alessandro Nivola; and a fellow doctor the psychiatrist befriends, played by the strikingly beautiful Natascha McElhone. The young shrink and his girlfriend have come to Laurel Canyon, an upscale neighborhood in the hills of Los Angeles, to stay at his mother's house while he does his residency, not expecting her to be there. But she is, producing a record with Nivola's band, and as a consequence, the young couple is quickly drawn into a web of temptation and, of course, betrayal. As a filmmaker, Cholodenko has an extraordinarily assured hand; the subtle and detailed touches with which she sets each scene force you to take her characters seriously, no matter how superficial and contrived their plight. And her ensemble of actors are breathtakingly good, except perhaps Beckinsale, whose character is a tad underwritten. Laurel Canyon is a bittersweet and thoroughly human film, and no matter how one might try, difficult to dismiss.
