DVD Review: L.A. Story (1991)

Consider this Part 2 of my remembrance of what I like to call Steve Martin’s Holy Three, a remembrance which only came into being once Dylan Fields of the renowned Man, I Love Films made this suggestion after my review of Roxanne. So thank you, Dylan. I adore any excuse to re-watch these movies.

Not sure how I never realized it but the opening to Steve Martin’s L.A. Story is essentially the la-la land version of the dreamy opening to Woody Allen’s Manhattan. Whereas Woody’s opens with the black and white image of Central Park at dawn, L.A. Story opens with a very much colorized image of gigantic prop hot dog dangling from a helicopter as it flies over a spread out city all lathered up in interstates and freeways and side streets which are all lathered up with cars and more cars and more cars. You might initially think this will be Martin’s way of using his screenplay to repeatedly bash the city’s emptiness and vastness and smogness which, I dare say, is how so many of us view Los Angeles. But Martin’s got a whole lot more on his mind.

This is what it boils down to: if you choose to wile away an afternoon at the Los Angeles County Museum Of Art by rollerskating past its most famous works – and bewildered onlookers – while your friend videotapes it, how you describe it? As A.) “A waste of time” or B.) “Performance art”? If you answered B then you and L.A. Story can get together for a viewing because you have the necessary disposition to believe in the Los Angeles in which Steve Martin the writer and Mick Jackson the director are asking us to believe.

Martin is Harris K. Telemacher, the wacky weekend weatherman for a local L.A. TV channel, and the first time we see him at work, sure enough, he’s mighty wacky, though the scene actually ends with the station’s co-anchors forcing laughter and then one of them saying to Harris, “I understand you have a degree in Arts and Humanity. Lot of good it did you.” And the last shot is one of Martin, taken aback, frozen, and, crucially, a little bit sad. This speaks volumes. He’s not afraid to make himself the butt of the joke, to have the humor turned inward.

Harris is in a relationship with Trudi (Marilu Henner) that appears less a relationship than a man and woman being together to allow for them to be seen in public places un-alone, which is presented in an early comedic set piece at a restaurant where they arrive 45 minutes late, which is still about 15 minutes too early, to meet a group of friends which is where Harris meets Sara (Victoria Tennant), a fetching, suitably quirky reporter in from Britain with no filter who has arrived to write a feature on the city’s “culture.” And if Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer’s most important relationship ended in a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, then it would it not only be appropriate for Harris K. Telemacher’s most important relationship to begin in a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard?

Of course, it won’t be so easy. Sara has not only come to America for a story but to see her ex-husband (Richard E. Grant), who is possibly gay and possibly doesn’t know it, who seems over-zealously insistent on re-kindling their romance. And this might very well be the reason why Harris finds himself cheating on the girlfriend he doesn’t really like (and who doesn’t really like him) not with Sara but with SanDeE*, a youthfully exuberant young lady who never attempts to hide the fact she has a boyfriend, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, who would go on to some acclaim years later as a New Yorker, in a utterly un-unlikeable performance that gets extraordinary mileage from social pirouettes and gum chewing.

In a nod to Hamlet’s epiphany at the graveyard, Harris and Sara realize their true feelings for one another at an L.A. cemetery (with Rick Moranis cameoing as the gravedigger) only to both do nothing about them because, well, he’s got his other gal and she’s got her other guy and as Martin himself once observed, “Lots of people lie to themselves without fooling anybody.”

Enter the traffic sign. Yes, in one of the great pieces of cinematic symbolism an actual traffic sign pulls Harris over after a soulless afternoon of shopping and begins speaking to him, doling out wisdom, urging him on, functioning as a sort of a Hollywood Freeway Guidance Counselor. It is moments such as these you realize just how underrated Steve Martin can be as an actor. He plays it humorously reluctantly – assuming he’s being filmed – but also completely willing to go along for the ride. And this is where the movie truly excels and becomes something else. Make no mistake, it’s so stacked with jokes – the funniest of which probably involves a restaurant reservation and a Patrick Stewart cameo (“You can certainly urge her in one direction”) – it’s easy to miss many of them the first or the second or even the third time around, but L.A. Story also transcends its base as a lightweight if hilarious comedy and ascends into the realm of loving, romantic fantasy.

As much as the funny stuff, this is a film about re-conjuring youth in a materialistic place, and not a traditional mid-life crisis sorta re-conjuring but something much more mystical and universal, like the way falling in love – whether for real or for one night – can somehow subtract a few years. One of the first things Sara says to Harris is this: “I always forget I’m a grown up.” Harris may be a wacky weatherman but that doesn’t mean he’s not showing his age. He needs to forget he’s a grown up, too, and it comes to fruition in the striking moment when a romantic interlude between Harris and Sara briefly transitions to a shot of the two characters as little kids in the same grown-up clothes, trudging along in their way too big adult shoes, hand-in-hand. Why do so many parents take their kids on excursions to Disneyland? So the kiddies can go wild and have a good time, yes, but isn’t there also maybe just a bit of hope they can sip from the cool, clear waters of the Fountain of Youth with Mickey and Goofey?

“Did you do this? Did I do this?” This is what Harris asks the traffic sign after everything has turned out the way it should, yet the traffic sign doesn’t seem so interested in answering. Maybe they both did it. Maybe fate has to work with us and maybe if we give ourselves over to fate and don’t simply scoff and immediately see the therapist when we think a traffic sign is talking to us we’d all be in a better place, whether that’s the west coast or the east coast.

Maybe Woody Allen have would have been a lot happier if he’d had a traffic sign to talk to.

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