Laurel Canyon Review

Two households collide in the Hollywood Hills and Lisa Cholodenko is far more interested in the temperature of the collision than in its outcome. Frances McDormand is superb as Jane, a record producer living in a permanent afternoon of pool water, weed and half finished mixes, and she is neither the monster nor the free spirit the setup seems to promise.

Christian Bale plays her son as a man holding himself together by posture alone, and the performance lives in small refusals: the way he will not sit down, the way he answers his mother's warmth with logistics. Kate Beckinsale does careful work as the fiancee who discovers she likes the house rather more than she expected to. Wally Pfister shoots the canyon in a hazy gold that makes the seduction plausible.

Where the film falters is structure. Cholodenko sets four people who all want something they should not have, finally gets all four into one hotel suite after the album party, and then lets the next morning drift away on a phone call Sam has no answer to, as though ambiguity were the same thing as an ending. The recording studio scenes with Alessandro Nivola also run long and sound like a director's affection for the milieu rather than like drama.