Rocking the family roles

Is there anything Frances McDormand can't do? She has adorned most of the Coen Brothers' movies and created one of the most engaging and unusual policewomen in cinema history as Marge Gunderson in Fargo. Here she is again, holding the centre of Lisa Cholodenko's lacklustre movie.

McDormand plays Jane, a successful LA record producer, whose rock-and-roll lifestyle is a constant embarrassment to her uptight, anally-retentive son Sam (Christian Bale). Having defected to the East Coast where he feels more comfortable among the WASP academics and buttoned-up corporate highfliers, Sam is scheduled to bring his brainy fiance, Alex (Kate Beckinsale), to stay at his mother's home in Laurel Canyon to complete their medical studies while she goes away on holiday.

Running late on a new album, Jane is not only still at home but also shacked up with her latest flame, the group's lead singer, Ian (Alessandro Nivola), 12 years her junior.

The studious Alex is caught between Jane's carefree, politically incorrect lifestyle and Sam's reactionary self-discipline. Before long she is joining Jane and the band in the studio, smoking dope and taking part in swimming-pool threesomes after dark.

Cholodenko has far less control and focus over her material here than she did in her earlier film High Art, and fails to raise the essential banality of the thematic conflict. McDormand towers over all, painting a thoroughly authentic portrait of a sexually liberated, hardworking, hard-playing woman and a self-confessed bad mother with enough primitive common sense and vestigial guilt to keep her from succumbing to the terminal effects of her hedonistic life.

Laurel Canyon
Cert: cert18