Richard E. Grant’s With Nails is the fascinating film diaries of the British niche actor. Two films covered in that book are satirical looks at Los Angeles of the early 90’s, one being The Player and the other being 1991’s L.A. Story.
The latter film stars, and was scripted by, Steve Martin. In this book, Grant describes the thrill and minor terror of an afternoon with the actor and, Victoria Tennant, Martin’s wife of the time. The host is “on” all the time, as they zip from one place to another, the comic monologuing seemingly non-stop. And there’s the couple’s art collection, which is prestigious. Of course, their house looks like something out of a Hockney painting.
Honestly, I think it would be tiring to be on the receiving end of what sounds like wit as dispensed through a fire hose on full blast. And that is how I felt about this particular Martin film.
Although the star has been fantastic in many other pictures, something felt forced throughout this, as if he was an overly precocious child desperately hogging the limelight. This is a film which needs room to breathe, but our protagonist keeps sucking all the air out of it.
He roller skates through an art museum. He answers his phone in the same manner an answering machine would normally handle the call, complete with beep. He delivers the weather forecasts in the kind of shtick I thought he had long abandoned, that of the era of being a “wild and crazy guy”. He converses with a highway informational LED sign which has cryptic messages tailor made for him.
The sign is especially helpful in guiding him through the romantic entanglements in his life. He ends up juggling Tennant and Sarah Jessica Parker and dumping girlfriend Marilu Henner. He did not know at first that she was having an affair with his agent. If you were thinking there might be a joke about that agent taking 10% of everything, then you have predicted that joke in the script.
You also may predict some other things, given the vintage and pedigree of this picture. Some of these low-hanging-fruit jokes concern the weirdos on the streets of Venice Beach at all hours. Another bit has separate lines of customers and muggers at an ATM, where each is paired together for a different assailant to get a cut of a withdrawal. There are jokes about fitness nuts, such as a stationary bike park (complete with sign reading “NO RUNNING”). The residents’ manner of speech is skewered in a quick gag where a crossing says to “UH LIKE WALK” or “UH LIKE DON’T WALK”. The city’s disdain for foot traffic results in Martin driving to his next door neighbor’s house. Another driving scene has four cars at an intersection all waving each other on until they all pull ahead simultaneously and broadside each other. Yet another scene has everybody shooting at each other on the interstate. Health food is represented by Martin taking a swig of some sort of green gunk which he declares to taste exactly like shag carpeting—a line that got a laugh out of me.
There are also the expected stabs at Californian restaurants, with the main one here being named L’Idiot. Seeing its name in neon for the first time is a pretty good gag, as we have only heard it said up until that point, and I was envisioning it spelled something like “Lidioh”. In the restaurant, the specials are rapped by the server, a joke which fell flat for me. So did a bit where the patrons can select from a variety of after-dinner flosses which everybody uses right at the tables.
A different restaurant is where Martin and friends are brunching when he first sees Tennant. She is a ray of sunshine, though an uncouth one, shocking everybody into silence with her admission all she needs to fix her jet lag is sleep and a good fuck. Grant is also there, bringing to my mind a similar scene from The Player, where Tim Robbin’s film executive asks those around a large table whether they could talk about anything other than movies, resulting in a collective and embarrassing silence. The brunch here is nowhere near as funny as that scene, though I chuckled a few times.
What Martin doesn’t know at first is Grant is Tennant’s ex, and he is desperately trying to rekindle a relationship with her. Our hero’s own interest in Tennant has not precluded him from having an affair with a young Parker, a relationship where the age disparity makes this look like a visualization of the Steely Dan track “Hey Nineteen”. One of the best lines in the script has Martin using specious logic to defend to Tennant his dating of Parker: “She’s not too young! She’ll be 27 in four years!”
I have never been a fan of Sex and the City and have found Parker’s fame to be confounding. That said, she is well-cast here as a hyperactive and hypersexualized woman who is bubbly without being a bubblehead. Her performance just looks exhausting, as she is seemingly unable to remain still for more than a second, forever cartwheeling and literally jumping on Martin.
Of course, this character presents the opportunity for more cheap gags. The California health craze gets needled (perhaps acupuncture needled, no?) when the couple goes to get high colonics together. I’ll admit I laughed hard at this exchange between her and him afterwards: “It really cleared my head.” “You need to go back and tell them they’re doing it wrong.”
A big problem with the movie overall is it never seems like it knows what it wants to be. A tone of magical realism creeps in with the LED freeway sign which directly communicates with Martin, telling him at a key moment to “KISS HER, YOU FOOL!” I wondered whether other drivers were seeing those same messages and, if so, whether there were some awfully uncomfortable conversations over the next few days after that.
But this takes place in a world which doesn’t know whether it wants to be complete farce or incisive satire. We have Tennant playing “Doo Wah Diddy Diddy” on the tuba in the same film where L.A. denizens are so unfazed by earthquakes that they remain seated at tables that are vibrating across the floor (of the latter, another solid laugh is a hard cut to the same conversations from before, which resume as if nothing had happened). There’s a bit with Martin’s commute taking him through backyards and down a long steep set of steps, not unlike a guy in Italy who recently tried to drive down the Spanish steps. But then there’s this realistic and clever bit: “So, you’re taking a course in conversation?” “[curtly] Yes.” There’s a shower with a “slo mo” setting, to change the scene to something like what is in every other film. There’s too much of everything and it all somehow adds up to not enough of anything.
There are also a great many cameos, among them Chevy Chase, George Plimpton, Larry Miller and Iman. Rick Moranis appears as a gravedigger in a pointless bit which extends a running gag about Shakespeare. In this film, the playwright inexplicably has a tombstone in L.A. Funny how I can both get and not-get this at the same time.
That brings to mind a similar joke much later in the runtime, where Martin is alarmed by the sound of metal objects slamming together and Grant reveals that would be his balls, and what a nuisance it is. Odd how I don’t seem to understand this joke, yet find it out-of-place because of its vulgarity just the same. I guess the idea is Grant’s character has brass balls, though he doesn’t even seem to have them in the symbolic sense.
All of this is why L.A. Story is nowhere near as enjoyable as it should be. Despite having laughed hard a few times, and chuckled a great many other, there was something that kept me an arm’s length from the material at all times and, frankly, the culprit is Martin. He has been so great in so many movies, and also in his writing, that I was stunned to find myself so put off by his persona here. I don’t recall ever seeing him so desperate to be perceived as clever, and that need to be the smartest person in the room results in a muddled tone where all that comes through is the overall smugness of the affair. Tennant says a line to Martin which sums up the movie: “You’re amusing yourself and others, but you’re just making noise.”
Dir: Mick Jackson
Starring Steve Martin, Victoria Tennant, Richard E. Grant, Sarah Jessica Parker
Watched on blu-ray