MovieChat Forums > Grand Canyon (1992) Discussion > Would this movie work if set in Milwauke...

Would this movie work if set in Milwaukee?


Or any other midwestern "flyover" city in the US? It's an ode to the self importance of LA lives -compared to life anywhere else which is ever so bor-ring. These people assume they have more to contribute and a more important story to tell about social issues de jour, be it racism, love, adultery, police brutality, blah blah, blah, just by living in the most "in" place of the world - although they probably don't realize there's just lots of
pretension here, but fair people must give credit to the acting which is quite good especially Alfre Woodard and Mary McConnell (sp?), and Danny Glover's soliloquy about the Grand Canyon and the meaninglessness of life was touching (if not a tiny bit nihlistic?) as was the restaurant story or the life is a left hand turn story, or the lonely aging mom, those were a bit exaggerated - but where and what sort of people ponder deep questions about life and existence to complete strangers, except maybe in LA? Perhaps that was poetry
intended. I did like this film a
lot because the characters were
well defined and the actors told
their stories well, so one did care
about them and wanted a happy
ending for all. In that sense this was a good film, much better than Crash.

reply

I think you could make a story like this work in Milwaukee, but it would be different. The thing about L.A. is that it provides a backdrop of great contrasts, with wealth, glamor, and beautiful people juxtaposed with the lives of ordinary people. You could set a movie like this in the Midwest (I live in Cleveland) but the story would seem a lot smaller without Porsches and Hollywood and Rodeo Drive. Which is not to say that it would be worse -- it might have more impact as a character study if it was stripped of the sense of the epic "big statement."

"Man, get yourself over to Lake Michigan. Yeah it's pretty all right, but that's not the thing of it. When you sit on the edge of that lake, you just realize what a joke we people are. What big heads we got thinking that what we do is gonna matter all that much. Thinking our time here means diddly to that water. Yeah, that water was laughing at me, I could tell."

reply

Well said! You wrote what I intended to convey in a much better way.

reply