Grown-Up Wasteland

A RELAXED Alan Rudolph eased his slim frame into the booth of a Cambridge restaurant and opened up a press get-together by brimming an empty beer glass with a local label. Sporting a neat beard and looking like a handsome Paul Simon without the emerging pate, Rudolph gazed out at the assembled journalists with all the aplomb of a seasoned schlepper of the talk show-press conference circuit who knows that this time around, he's got something special to market. And so it is with the 32-year old director; in Rudolph's case however, his heady success is more that of the young short-story writer whose first full-scale novel has the critics calling for more.

Rudolph's debut feature Welcome to L.A. deserves a couple of critics' stars on guts alone: he has consciously borrowed the impressionistic slice-of-life framework of Nashville and made it work with even less of a plot than Robert Altman's cinematic paradigm. Granted that the basically uncommercial quality of the format has been somewhat offset by the presence of a galaxy of New Hollywood actors; but from a strictly critical standpoint, Rudolph has effectively invited comparisons with his famous mentor that would seem to place his first major work at an almost fatal disadvantage. Yet Welcome to L.A. still manages to equal and even surpass Nashville in some respects, and facile comparisons with Altman fail to ruffle Rudolph, which may be itself the most convincing testimony to the consummate artistry of the film.

Welcome to L.A. relates the tale of Carroll Barber (Keith Carradine), a songwriter cum stud who has been flown into Los Angeles by his millionaire father (Denver Pyle) on the pretense of composing a battery of tunes for a superstar singer's next album. We see Carroll whisked from office to office, from bitter reunion to happy reunion, from boudoir to boudoir. A taciturn character by nature who oozes ennui from every pore, Carroll is everybody's darling, from his rags-to-riches dad who hasn't received a letter from his prodigal son in three years to the older women who roll out the red carpet for this slightly bewildered conquistador.

Bear in mind that what makes the film a genuine offshoot of Nashville is its structure, not its theme: Rudolph's script is indeed relating Carroll's story but it is not focusing on him. No real overriding social commentary can be gleaned from Welcome to L.A. that compares with the heavy-handed moralism of Altman's Nashville vision. Instead, the state of the American psyche is Rudolph's primary preoccupation. He dubbed the genre of Welcome to L.A. "emotional science-fiction--it shows what will happen if we don't watch out." And his own words capture the essence of the theme well: "Romance ain't dead, it's just gone crazy."

Romance has not just gone crazy in the City of the One Night Stands, it's gone kaput, period. The most unsettling facet of this death-of-love motif is the pervasiveness of its reality among the film's otherwise diverse characters. The malaise afflicts the professionally fulfilled executive (Harvey Keitel) as deeply as his hopelessly unfulfilled housewife (Geraldine Chaplin), who fancies herself a modernday Camille, running around spouting melodrama and sipping Carroll's Southern Comfort between lines. It fails to discriminate between John Considine's hail-fellow-well-met furniture dealer and Carradine's petulant artiste. With one noteworthy exception, each of the ten central figures goes in search of a human connection, and each comes up empty-handed (if only in the figurative sense). Move over Teenage Wasteland, the film says, and make way for an equally parched desert peopled with men and women who are a bit older but no less confused and frustrated than the Who's quadrophenic.

Had enough bleakness and despair for one morning's reading, you say? Before you avert your eyes and turn to less disturbing subject matter, consider the other elements of Welcome to L.A. that commend the film to your moviegoing attention. Firstly, not every character flounders through life in the throes of utter despondency. The exception appears in the form of the superstar vocalist Eric Wood, played by Richard Baskin (who also wrote the scores for Welcome and Nashville). He serves the function of being the token enigma in the cast, providing a refreshing contrast with the honesty-chic psychobabble of the Los Angelenos. Rudolph deliberately made no effort to flesh out the character, to probe his innermost feelings. The viewer never sees Wood outside of the recording studio, and he maintains his aloofness even within his own habitat, always seated behind a piano bathed in darkness and shadows while singing one of his plaintive songs about the lonely hearts of Southern California.

"I wanted that character to be the way music is in out lives," Rudolph said, responding to a question. "When you buy a record and play it, it is up to you what that performer is." Such thinking suggests a point of departure from the premises that underlay Joan Tewksberry's Nashville script, where most of the major characters appeared first as entertainment figures in one way or another but later came under some intense scrutiny anyway.

Similarly subtle features of Welcome distinguish it from its acclaimed forerunner. Rudolph's script is very conscious of the need to deal with its characters on their own terms, without any touch of caricature. A few of Tewksberry's characters bordered on becoming stereotypes; Chaplin's featherweight BBC journalist and Shelley Duvall's L.A. Joan are cases in point. Rudolph skirted this chronic problem by allowing his cast considerable freedom to exercise their improvisational skills. While he did bring a finished script to the filming phase of the production, Rudolph still placed a premium on preserving a certain force of spontaneity. And the final product shows it, in little ways. For example, during the course of a party, one character asks another for a match; instead of the time-honored "Got a light?" line, she goes with the now fashionable "Fire?".

Some cineastes have problems dealing with Altman's distinctive technique of mixing several reels of simultaneously spoken dialogue together, a trademark that captures the actual quality of everyday conversation far better than any previous method used. The dialogue often sounds garbled however, a built-in hazard that has dismayed actors as well as viewers (e.g. Warren Beatty's post-production grumblings about the sound in McCabe & Mrs. Miller). When I first screened Welcome, I listened closely for this technique and failed to notice it. Rudolph subsequently told me that the method in fact was used; if true, then I can only conclude that Rudolph and his sound men have perfected the technique, because its application never became obvious, even in the scenes that featured large social gatherings.

Welcome has all the earmarks of a big-budget, big studio release, and the visuals are no exception. Director of photography Dave Myers shot all the scenes in exclusively natural colors and light, and the richness and clarity of the hues are striking. For this reviewer, the acid test of a movie's cinematography and lighting effects lies in whether specific scenes linger in the memory and can be readily brought to mind as an instant association with the mere mention of the title. Welcome fills this bill of particulars admirably; look for the shot of Carradine at a piano, his head and body dappled here and there with rays of light that highlight the contrast of the silhouetted songwriter against the blackness of his darkened living room. The craftsmanship and care that went into the filming are stamped all over the movie; I had to double check with Rudolph to confirm that I had correctly understood him when he blithely informed me that he had worked with a $900,000 budget and a 30-day filming schedule, never once missing a deadline or exceeding a financial ceiling.

For a movie that delivers so much in so many varied areas, Welcome somewhat disappoints with its acting. No single performance truly dominates the story, nor is Welcome studded with especially accomplished supporting performances. Keitel has added yet another polished evocation of a character to an ever-lengthening string of impressive roles (Taxi Driver, Mean Streets). However, his character, the go-getting executive Ken Hood, is simply not central enough to the narrative to eclipse the other less inspired performances. Sissy Spacek's considerable talents are wasted in the peripheral role of a live-in housekeeper who keeps Carradine's apartment tidied up. As for Carradine himself, he has once again needlessly pigeonholed himself in choosing a role that requires an actor who is long on looks but short on just about everything else. His Carroll Barber invites analogies to regrettably similar roles in recent years (Lumiere, Nashville), and the acting potential first suggested by his stunning performance in Altman's Thieves Like Us remains undeveloped.

No piece on a film partly about music would be complete without some reference to the soundtrack, and Baskin's score makes the task easier. While most of the songs sound like a second-rate version of Laura Nyro with a jazzy twist and a male voice, the occasional poetic outbursts in his lyrics do draw attention. Baskin seems to be treading on all too familiar ground:

Morning comes early in a stranger's bed, it's never quite as easy when you're straight

I'd like to have a dime for all the promises that stoney lovers make when it gets late, sure it hurts (still it feels pretty good) to be livin' in the city of the one night stands--where the nighttime makes it easy to feel crazy

You want to get saved, but there's nothin' there worth saving

The words read better than they actually sound in the film, and unlike many of the movie's other aspects, the lyrics are not what you'd call accessible. But the musings of Baskin do ring true, and you suspect that if Baskin is not a native of the Southland, his experience with the L.A. scene has been both thorough and bittersweet.

BEING A LIFE-LONG Angeleno, I approached my first screening of Welcome with a pronounced ambivalence, half-expecting a compendium of cheap shots at the city to be woven into the plot. Films set in Los Angeles often spew out the same old Nathaniel West themes, only in a vulgarized way: the plasticity of Southern California, the impermanence of everything from buildings to relationships, etc. But the PR hype about Welcome to L.A. proved true in at least this one sense: Rudolph has carefully omitted all the stale cliches about the place and coined a couple of possible new ones in the process. There are no smog-hazed sunsets, no bronzed California girls in hiphugger jeans, no West Coast crazies. In their place, we only have genuine human beings grappling as best they can with the unkind vicissitudes of life and the darker side of the human condition. The film may not necessarily uplift, but it will stimulate and cause you to reflect about the characters' lives and your very own existence. Rudolph has clearly taken his work and himself very seriously; his characters, themes and Los Angeles have all gotten a fair shake, and so will the viewer.