Review of L.A. Story (1991) by Edith N — 19 May 2011

Seventy-Two and Snow.

I don't get homesick for California often. I didn't like living there, and I very much like living here. However, Los Angeles County will always trigger "home" for me, and every once in a while, I get an intense and inexplicable longing for it. I'll be visiting in the fall, probably for long enough to stave off any homesickness for years. But when it strikes, my cure of choice is Mexican food and this movie. As with everyone else who's lived there, I can recognize a lot of the places the movie is filmed. My mother has a membership in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, for example, and of course there's Venice Beach. But what this movie does is not just let me look on places I've known all my life. If that were all it took, I'd cave in and buy [i]Anywhere but Here[/i] so I could just stare at my mom's front porch. No, the advantage this film has is in both showing me what I miss and reminding me of what I don't. It's kind of my childhood in a nutshell, so I can go on with the rest of my life.

Harris K. Telemacher (Steve Martin) is the Wacky Weatherman on a local LA TV station's evening news. One day he goes to brunch with his girlfriend, Trudi (Marilu Henner), and he encounters Sarah McDowel (Victoria Tennant). He develops a thing for her, but of course, he's still with Trudi. He also meets the extremely hyper SanDeE* (Sarah Jessica Parker). Also a freeway sign which gives him advice. He falls in love with Sarah, but she is in Los Angeles from London to try to get back together with her ex-husband, Roland Mackey (Richard E. Grant), and Harris is with Trudi. Only Trudi is sleeping with his agent (Kevin Pollak), leaving him in theory free to get together with Sarah. Only, you know, Roland. So he fools around with SanDeE* (and, yes, that's how she spells her name, "and there's a star at the end"), all the while trying to figure out the Mystery of the Ages as presented by the sign. Various Los Angeles things happen to everyone.

Not that the plot really matters, even though there's a lot of it. I haven't even mentioned his neighbour, Ariel (Susan Forristal), and the performance art. SanDeE*'s open relationship. The inexplicable Woody Harrelson. (Though he always is.) However, a more important character than any of these is the city itself. I have spoken before about the Mythic Los Angeles, and doubtless it will come up again. And this movie is firmly set in Mythic Los Angeles. However, it's aware that it isn't quite real. This is the Los Angeles where Shakespeare lived. ("I think he wrote [i]Hamlet Part Eight: The Revenge[/i] here.") If we needed another clue, it's the weather reports. The weather is always 72 and sunny. The movie presents us with the Los Angeles we think exists. On the other hand, it also shows us that there is much to love in Mythic Los Angeles. Not just the parts that are why I moved away in the first place. There are still places worth seeing even when they're filled with out-of-towners. Including that Shakespeare fella in the cemetery.

Actually, the movie really is full of Shakespeare and various other intellectual bits. Roland, one of the dumbest characters in the movie, goes on about how Los Angeles is a place for the brain dead, and many of the silliest things in the movie fail to exist only because Steve Martin thought of them first, but there is also intelligence there. Rick Moranis gets an uncredited cameo as "a funny gravedigger," which is rapidly followed by one of those lines which I think sums up the city. Harris tells Sarah that, when he's around her, he finds himself showing off, "which is the idiot's version of being interesting." Only of course Harris isn't an idiot. I learned the "tale told by an idiot" quote in its entirety from this movie. His problem is that he's so totally surrounded with people who think they're more interesting than they are that he doesn't realize that he actually might be just as interesting as he thinks he is. He has to pretend to be dumb, because it's what's expected of him, so he doesn't know how to be as smart as he is.

Steve Martin apparently wrote this movie for two reasons. The first and sweetest is that he wanted to do a romantic comedy with his wife. The second is that he was sick of people making fun of Los Angeles. "Forget," he tells us at the end, "the smog and the cars and the restaurant and the skating." Mythic Los Angeles does exist, but there are layers and layers of city beyond that which few people who have not lived there seem to know. This means that I'm also perfectly aware that this movie is funnier to me than most of my friends. I actually once waited for a commercial break to go check on kids I was babysitting when there was an earthquake. (If it had woken them up, I would have known, and it wasn't a very big earthquake.) So I laugh in a "funny because it's true" way. It's not hard to believe that the movie was written by a man whose first job was at Disneyland, one of the icons of Mythic Los Angeles. And it isn't even in Los Angeles County.