Review of Grand Canyon

Introduction

Sold to both audiences and its financiers as a ‘Big Chill’ for the 90s, ‘Grand Canyon’ was almost deserving of scorn before even a frame was shot, so cynical and condescending the marketing tactics. But lets give it the benefit of the doubt, this is merely the introduction after all: A never particularly dense mixture of characters in 90s LA orbit around a symbolic rendering of the Grand Canyon centered by Kevin Kline’s slightly discombobulated immigration lawyer and his needy wife Mary MacDonnell. When he breaks down in ghetto-grave USA after a Lakers match, Danny Glover’s good Samaritan tow-truck driver comes to the rescue and sets in motion a series of life-changing ‘miracles’, and even a couple of heavily metaphorical dream sequences.

Video

Okay, but not great. As a back-issue release, Fox haven’t bothered to clean up the print, so there are rather too many obvious traces of dirt and grain for my liking. However, it is anamorphic, and the film generally looks good, except for some dated special effects.

Audio

A good surround track that begins with that good old LA movie cliché of the orbiting helicopter through all five channels (an image that reoccurs often in the film), and continues with considerable style throughout. Just good enough to not be too noticeable.

Features

The obligatory crappy featurette that offers as little information as you’d expect (i.e. plenty of on-set matey petting between the actors and cryptic interview clips with director Lawrence Kasdan.) We also get the trailer. Oh how spoiled we are.

Conclusion

Ignoring for a moment the tactlessness of repackaging the baby-boomer self-love-fest of ‘The Big Chill’ for the dislocated world of Rodney King, grunge and race riots, this is still a deeply confused and duplicitous work. Supposedly a multi-faceted depiction of 90s LA, this is really a quite unbelievably solipsistic film about a Hollywood insider’s longing for redemption after a lifetime of corporate slavery to the blockbusting machine (here personified, literally, by Steve Martin’s sleazy, cynical producer.) Lawrence Kasdan, the perpetrator of this 130 minute slice of self-indulgent meaninglessness, worked on the most successful films of the 80s (‘Return of the Jedi’, ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ and ‘Big Chill’) and now feels it necessary to purge the bile of this supposedly nightmare ephemeral culture he helped spawn.

As if it needs mentioning, the ensemble narrative has none of the humanity, humor or complexity of Altman’s work (which it clearly mimics, albeit with a glossy, conventional haze.) The actors do their best, (particularly Mary-Louise Parker as Kline’s neurotic, lovelorn secretary) but suffer from a script that relies almost entirely on rootless white-boy rants about the destabilization of his power base, disguised as a rupture of the natural order for every living being. As a result, this film is incredibly stupid, as well as quite unexpectedly boring for a writer as playful and clever as Kasdan. And the supposedly transcendent conclusion, where our remaining cadre (re: new liberal trans-racial family) are bonded by gazing into the titular big ol’ f***ing hole in the ground is so inane that the overblown Fordian orchestra it induces seems to suggest that Kasdan was in on the joke all along. Bizarre, certainly, but still cinematic masturbation masquerading as spiritual reckoning.