Monday, July 05, 2010
BEER WITH BREAKFAST
My favorite L.A. movie, Lawrence Kasdan’s Grand Canyon, opens with its protagonist, Mack (Kevin Kline), staving off the predatory advances of a neighborhood gang when his Lexus breaks down in Inglewood late one night after a Lakers game.1
As Mack’s worst-case scenario is about to unfold, the cavalry arrives2 in the person of Simon (Danny Glover), who wastes no time in hooking up Mack’s car to his tow truck. Simon is so businesslike, so matter-of-fact, that by the time the thugs think to threaten him, he has already put them at a disadvantage. “Now that this car’s hooked up to my truck, it’s my responsibility,” he says in a vocabulary clearly unfamiliar to them, and he continues to reason with them until he talks himself and Mack safely into his cab and out of Inglewood.
One morning a few days later, Mack appears at the garage as Simon returns from his night shift, explaining that he wanted to be sure he did enough to thank Simon for saving his life. Simon downplays his heroics, but Mack insists, asking if he can buy Simon breakfast.
The scene and the conversation that follow contain the entire meaning of the movie and mark the beginning of one of the most beautiful cinematic friendships since Rick Blaine and Louis Renault strolled into the fog at the end of Casablanca. But what eventually caught my eye is what’s for breakfast.
The transition from garage to diner is handled with a single establishing shot that lasts about 10 seconds: A plate of bacon, potatoes, and two eggs sunny side up sits on a counter. A waitress enters the frame, sets a beer bottle beside the plate and uncaps it. She sets down her bottle opener, picks up the plate, and carries it away. It’s not even Simon or Mack’s breakfast we’re seeing in the shot — it’s just something to mark the transition along with the overlapping dialogue, and the camera follows the waitress just far enough to frame Simon and Mack at their table by the window. As she exits the frame, Kasdan cuts to his stars in a medium two-shot.
Ever since I first noticed that transition, I’ve been captivated by the idea that someone would — or even could — order a beer with their breakfast.3 So predictable have I become with my black coffee with one packet of sugar that it had never occurred to me how perfectly suited some breakfast foods are to be accompanied by a beer. And because the usual suspects of the breakfast-anytime crowd (e.g., IHOP, Denny’s, Waffle House) don’t list beer on their bills of fare, it’s easy to overlook the option when one finds oneself in an old-fashioned, non-franchise diner that flies in the face of Prohibition and family values.
Sometime back, when Adriane still lived in Wyoming, we found ourselves at our favorite local breakfast-anytime haunt, Bear Town Restaurant4, where I happened to note the availability of Budweiser on the menu. It’s not a beer I would order under ordinary circumstances, but for this purpose, one doesn’t want or need some fancy microbrew or highfalutin import — a decent American-made lager or pilsner will do.
I’m here to tell you that the pairing of a cold Budweiser longneck with a plate of corned beef hash and eggs is like kismet. So much so that I’m almost ashamed that I needed a movie to point it out to me.
That said, I wouldn’t put it past Kasdan to have intended this insignificant detail as a visual cue, a gustatory metaphor for Mack and Simon’s relationship.
1 The film was released in 1991, when the Lakers still played at the Great Western Forum.
2 The first time we lay eyes on Simon, the first shot is of his cowboy boots as he dismounts from his tow truck, another seemingly insignificant detail in a movie full of little details and rich with symbolism that I may someday write about at greater length. (It is perhaps an homage to the fact that Glover and Kline also co-starred in Kasdan’s Silverado. The scene, in fact, plays out like something out of a Western.)
3 Admittedly, though, Tom Waits and Charles Bukowski spring to mind.
4 We even have our own table there, where we have been seated, without ever requesting it, on all but one occasion.
Previous Insignificant Details:
#4: Sunset Boulevard
#3: North by Northwest
#2: Vertigo
#1: Rear Window
