Laurel Canyon

Laurel Canyon was a film that I found to be easier (in fact, much easier) to follow than The Piano. But, like The Piano, Laurel Canyon has many, if not all, characters that are dynamic. Sam is the psychiatrist who has a bright future in the field of psychiatry. Sam seems very clean-cut in the beginning (and basically is throughout the course of the movie. However he runs into some slip ups when he gets close with his colleague who works in the same hospital as he. This is surely not the committed man we observed in the beginning of the movie. His girlfriend is much worse. She, also, seems very clean cut and determined in her work (especially on a dissertation she is writing.) However, this all seems to change when living with Sam's mother for a couple of days. She begins to dramatically alter her behavior, by smoking marijuana, drinking more, and even becoming slightly promiscuous with her boyfriends mother and her lover, who is a musician. The musician was the one who mainly caught Alex's eye. It gets to the point where the three are about to engage in a threesome- until Sam's mother stops it. In the beginning of the movie, she was portrayed as someone wild. She changes by getting control of herself and stopping the sexual threesome before it even started. The only character who doesn't seem to change is the musician, who until the very end still had his charisma and sexual energy. What makes the characters even more dynamic is that they go from "normal," to not being themselves, and going back to "normal" again by getting back together (Sam and Alex.) So all in all, most of the characters experience some kind of change in this movie. We do not know the results of what happens and that is pretty much the only thing that disappointed me about this movie.