Laurel Canyon

(Lisa Cholodenko, 2002)

I watched this because it was one of the films The Guardian listed as among Frances McDormand’s ‘ten best film roles’. I kind of decided I’d like to watch all the ones I hadn’t known about or seen before, but I guess started with this because there was a music angle.

So, she plays a veteran rock producer living in Laurel Canyon (photos we get to see on bookshelves of her with Iggy, Bowie etc.). The story takes place while she’s working on the new record of a British band (weirdly, the lead singer, very authentically and convincingly British, played by an American – Alessandro Nivola – while the three main characters apart from McDormand are all British playing Americans and one Israeli) who are hilariously archetypal, I guess very 90s with more than a dash of Coldplay, or at least Chris Martin in the Nivola character. The caricature of ‘rockness’ in the producer and the band is hilarious, but then what would I know really? Are people really like that? Maybe…

The band itself who play the group in the studio really are musicians, so the songs (two, written by Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous) which they play in the studio are not being faked in any way. The band members themselves are very understated, in terms of who plays them. But it’s made up of, I guess, 80s esp. 90s veterans of a very slightly left of centre US rock scene: Lou Barlow (!) is one of them… and there’s this guy Imaad Wasif, who is kind of the wild card, but an interesting character to isolate for a moment, because he’s a solo artist (from India, though I’m guessing with some UK transit?) who (IRL) kind of settles in LA and becomes part of an under-layer of the music scene like Beth J-H/Du Blonde – sort of known, with a bit of a following, backed by someone but not mainstream, while making a kind of music that is savvy to those who saturate themselves in mainstream/corporate rock legacies but have nothing remotely divergent to offer (except for a particular guitar sound or some now-not-so-daring-at-all publicity photos/album art).

The drama itself is a love story, Christian Bale and Kate Beckinsdale very all-American, convincingly so and very well acted, whose soon-to-be-married careerism in science/medicine gets rocked (figuratively and literally) by the need to stay temporarily with McDormand’s mother-rock-producer and the band… It’s quite good, although I found it tedious for the most part. Best thing is the performances themselves – all the main cast, especially Frances McDormand, horribly good in her fucked-up, conflicted/industry-afflicated role…

But also, the way the songs in the film work, so so redolent of a deadness in rock/pop songwriting, working in standard forms, producing distinctiveness and nuance through very subtle twists in the formula (increasingly, barely) where the bland acceptance of that methodology is so symptomatic of a dying race that won’t improvise when it needs to as a matter of literal survival…