DVD BLU RAY & TV
LAUREL CANYON: A PLACE IN TIME
EPIX
7/10
Familiar stories from a fabled West Coast locale, enlivened by intimate archival footage. By Stephen Deusner
One overcast morning in March 1969, Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell descended from Laurel Canyon down into Los Angeles to eat breakfast and run some errands. Along the way the two lovers stopped by an antique store, where Mitchell bought a small, blue vase – nothing extravagant, but beautiful in its modesty. When they returned to her home, Nash suggested she stroll through the woods to pick flowers for that vase. Rather than build the fire he promised, he sat down at her piano and began writing a song about their shared domestic bliss: “I’ll light the fire, you put the flowers in the vase that you bought today.” By the time “Our House” was released on Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s 1970 album Déjà Vu, the couple had parted ways, but the song remains one of that band’s most popular and most durable hits.
That story has been told countless times, and it’s recounted. Nash narrates it in voiceover – and in much the same way he told the story in his 2013 memoir , rehashing the same details one more time. As he does, director Alison Ellwood shows vintage footage of the couple at their house, both Super 8 home movies and still photos. Those images, even more than Nash’s weathered voice or the song playing softly in the background, breathe some fresh life into the story and emphasise the tenderness of the gestures and the human scale of the happiness chronicled in the song.
