March 12 2003

FRANCES MCDORMAND WEARS a series of tight rock T-shirts over the deep tan of a veteran pleasure seeker. Her hair is long, dirty blond, and loosely curled by God. She's playing a record producer named Jane in Lisa Cholodenko's Laurel Canyon; on the surface, Jane's look is rather Sheryl Crow-ish, but McDormand enlivens that southern California cliché with her tough intelligence – her character's musicality doesn't seem like a put-on, and her hedonism is connected to genuine impulse rather than ladder-climbing calculation. Soaking up the sun, McDormand exposes the sex appeal in her strength. If it makes her happy, it can't be that bad.

Aside from McDormand's aggressive search for bliss, Laurel Canyon's credit sequence is its highlight. A Ronettes-style "Be My Baby" backbeat kicks in as a United Airlines plane descends over Los Angeles highways. The blithe, fey pop song that follows is paired with the scenery glimpsed by Jane's uptight psychiatrist son Sam (Christian Bale) and his prissy fiancée, model student Alex (Kate Beckinsale), as they drive into Jane's neighborhood, the hilly terrain – all cactus gardens and ramshackle mailboxes – designated in Cholodenko's title. The song's lyric speaks of changing seasons and a sense of missed connections. The title font dominates an otherwise clear blue skyline, and the movement of each letter forecasts the story: actor's names drift in opposing directions, separating from within as well.

Adrift between graduation and their wedding day, Alex and Sam hoped to find Jane's house empty, but when they open the door she's in the middle of work – taking a bong hit in search of a pop hit, flanked on both sides by guys Sam's age. Her latest studio project is a glossy British version of the Folk Implosion that includes a mute Lou Barlow and her current "deep connection," lead singer Ian (Alessandro Nivola). The stage is set for a mother and child reunion in which the mother is the child. Bale's Sam can't keep the smirk off his face and the resentment out of his voice as he discusses Jane's past affairs – or, later, when he discovers his wife-to-be has set aside her drosophila genome studies for the latest issue of Spin.

A comic West Coast B-side to the tragic East Coast affair in High Art, Cholodenko's second film again uses a young woman's seduction by an older woman to tell the story of cloistered naïveté falling prey to cultivated recklessness. (Laurel Canyon's bloodlines and time zone also invoke The Graduate, a comparison that can't help being unflattering.) High Art's achievement – particularly when balanced against movies like Trainspotting – was its portrait of junkie symbiosis; Chodolenko was foolish and brave enough to risk taking the emotional perspective of a vampire's victim. The final, Graduate-inspired shot of her new movie submerges itself in a pool, gazing up at the deformed reflection of a home on the water's surface, but her screenplay only dips its toes into the messiness of family ties and taboos. Flirtation is the name of the game here.

Or sublimation, if one adopts the vocabulary of Sam's fellow neuropsychiatrist Sara (Natasha McElhone), whose weirdly exaggerated supermodel beauty tempts him into a sober version of the high infidelity blooming at his temporary home. Set designer Catherine Hardwicke decorates Jane's lair with framed pictures of McDormand's character bonding with Bowie and Iggy – together! – and Joni Mitchell, whose 1970 Ladies of the Canyon obviously provided some inspiration for the screenplay. Wa-wa effects rise like incense through the floor of the room where Alex is writing about the mating habits of fruit flies, and for her, the sound has an aphrodisiac quality. But around the third time a little whirligig guitar passage introduces a sequence, Cholodenko's use of musical "atmosphere" verges on being a Seinfeld sitcom tactic.

Even though its plot has the localized navel-gazing symptoms of U.S. indie's most recent dying breed (remember Alison Anders's Sugar Town? – well, you're in the minority), Laurel Canyon's casual intelligence is refreshing in comparison to the heavy-handed, uselessly guilt-ridden U.S. dramas that, if this year's Sundance Film Festival is any indication, will be unleashed during the time bomb known as 2003. Still caught up in Clinton-era "problems," Cholodenko at least realizes that misheard and misspoken words are as revealing as any poolside or bedroom romp. She also knows the history of the turf she's depicting (the film's romantic conflicts explode at the Château Marmont) and has an eye for the character quirks of its residents: early on, Jane smokes a cigarette while grinding juice that's "great for the colon." As embodied by McDormand, Jane's the kind of female character unseen in American film since Pam Grier's Jackie Brown. Strange that her zip code locates her within the heart of Hollywood.