Starring Richard E. Grant, Marilu Henner, Steve Martin, Sarah Jessica Parker, Victoria Tennant.
Rating: 9/10, 10/10.
I tend to rave about things. It’s a weakness of mine. I get far too overenthused about movies I like, and if you’ve read some of my reviews, you’ll see that it shows. That said, when I rave about LA Story, I’m not exaggerating. I wouldn’t know how to exaggerate about LA Story, because it is, quite simply, that good.
The story revolves around Harris Telemacher (Martin), a TV weatherman in Los Angeles, who is in an empty relationship with Trudi (Henner) until one day he meets a British woman named Sara (Tennant) who gives him a whole new reason to live. There are all sorts of complications keeping them from getting together, but in a departure from romantic comedy tradition, these complications make sense and could not be solved by the characters simply telling the truth. They involve Sara’s ex-husband Roland (Grant), who wants to get back together with her, and the much younger woman (Parker) Harris got himself involved with before he thought there was anything possible with Sara. The younger woman, by the way, is named SanDeE*.
The movie kind of runs its romantic plot on two completely different levels. First, there is the usual Steve Martin-style wacky comedy. Second, there is the magic and beauty of life. Both are played to near perfection, and while one might expect that they would clash—after all, they are nearly opposite—they meld together seamlessly. The comedy is top-notch (Harris: "SanDeE*, your breasts feel strange." SanDeE*: "Oh, that’s because they’re real."), among the best Martin has ever done. Watch out particularly for a joyously silly scene where Harris surreptitiously rollerskates through a museum as his friend films him. As for the magic, it’s...well, magical. There’s one part where Harris and Sara are having a fight outside her car when suddenly it starts rolling, the lights turn on, and the doors swing open, beckoning them inside, and that was one of the many times this movie took my breath away, almost literally. Many of the scenes would be insufferably cheesy in just about anyone else’s hands, but somehow Martin, who wrote the screenplay, and director Jackson treat it in such a way that even a climactic scene in which rain pours down dramatically as Harris and Sara reach out and touch the separate windows they’re gazing out of simultaneously, while all the time 1991 Enya plays on the soundtrack, comes off as utterly beautiful, rather than horrifically tacky, like it sounds.
Soon after I saw LA Story for the first time, two years ago, I made a favorite 100 movies list, and it made the top fifteen. Now that I’ve seen it again, I think I ranked it too low.