Laurel Canyon

I really can’t categorize Laurel Canyon as a “chick flick” because it doesn’t have a mainstream feel to it. If anything I would consider Laurel Canyon to be a coming of age/identity story. It is definitely a lifetime channel type film. Lifetime always shows movies that have a really loose plot, like you can tune in any time doing the movie and you cant be sure that you didn’t really miss anything important. I felt that way about Laurel Canyon. As long as you knew Alex was curious, Sam was frustrated and Jane was new age hippie-ish nothing else was important. Alex had apparently been raised in a really sheltered atmosphere. She spent all her time studying and socializing with people from the academic world. Having never experienced such a free flowing lifestyle like Jane’s it only makes sense that Alex was intrigued. In a way I feel as if Sam should have expected Alex to react in one of two ways to her “new environment”. Alex would either A) become more isolated and shield herself from Jane’s antics by working more and more on her dissertation. Or B) Alex would be intrigued by Jane’s lifestyle and want to participate. Sam should have been able to see that Alex was slipping into Jane’s world after she spent long nights in the studio and got high with the crew. Then again perhaps Sam was so self-involved that he wasn’t able to track his fiancée’s progression to the lifestyle of the careless. When Sam opened up to Sarah he told her that he didn’t want to be lost like “people with loose ends”. Everything in his relationship with Alex had direction. His sex life had directions, her work was structured, his job had simple purpose. The lack of a typical mother-son relationship stems from Sam’s desire to distance himself and not “sink” into the world that his mother revels in.

here's another interview with the director. she talks about jane's character and how she was inspired to create certain roles.