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STEVERINO: L.A. STORY, FATHER OF THE BRIDE

© Sean Gallagher

One article written about Steve Martin in the late 80's took as its title his self-deprecating line about himself that he was just a white guy from Orange County. Of course, Martin is a lot more than that, yet that sums up his approach. When we think of the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) stereotype, we tend to think of the dull yuppie (and indeed, when WASPish actors like William Hurt and John Heard began to dominated screens in the early 80's, movie critics took it as a sign that movies would become homogenized and worse). At his best, however, Martin is anything but dull. He's an intellectual who at the same time has a harried sense of humor. Or, if you want to look at it another way, he's a gifted physical comedian who also has a tendency to stand back and question himself.

Early on in his career, Martin only let that intellectual side show obliquely, if at all, yet you could clearly detect a sensibility there. After all, this is the man who made DEAD MAN DON'T WEAR PLAID, where part of the comedy was watching his character interact with different characters from 40's and 50's film noirs. And in ALL OF ME, while this is mostly dependent on physical comedy, you can tell, as with Chaplin, that it only looks like an anything-goes approach. When Martin turned to writing his own scripts, he combined the intellectual with the manic successfully in ROXANNE, his 1987 updating of CYRANO DE BERGERAC, and added some genuine romanticism as well. In L.A. STORY, directed by Mick Jackson, he combines all three approaches again for a terrific film.

As ROXANNE was inspired by CYRANO DE BERGERAC, this film is inspired by HAMLET, though not as overtly. It does have the hero being indecisive about his fate, and there's two overt references; Rick Moranis plays a gravedigger, and there's a freeway sign that's sort of like the ghost in the play. But mostly, this seems inspired by Woody Allen's MANHATTAN, which was Allen's love-hate note to the city he lived in. Given that Martin's sensibility is less neurotic than Allen's, his view here is more celebratory (you got the feeling that if the FIELD OF DREAMS players stepped into L.A. and asked that question, "Is this heaven?", Martin's answer would be, "No, it's L.A."). We get this from director Mick Jackson's opening credit montage, where sprinklers come on as if choreographed in a ballet, signs say, "Uh, like Walk," and cars at a four-way intersection wave each other forward, and crash into each other. We get this sensibility throughout the movie, as teller robbers say, "Hi, I'm Bob, I'll be your robber tonight," people order any kind of drink with a twist of lemon, and people have to have their financial statements checked before they can dine at a fancy restaurant ("You cannot have the duck. Do you think that with a financial statement like this you could have the duck?").