Damien Chazelle’s movie La
La Land loves a lot of things. It loves classical Hollywood – its history
and icons, its landmarks and those young dreamers who want to be part of it. It
loves jazz music and people who care about it. It loves bright primary colors
and the radiant California sun burnishing everything under it. It loves
remarkably long tracking shots that follow actors’ dance numbers up and down
L.A. freeways, hillsides, bungalows, and bars. It loves Emma Stone’s gargantuan,
almost cartoonish eyes, glittering with tears. It’s a movie with a lot of love
for a lot of things, and Hollywood loves it right back. Recently, it won seven
Golden Globes, a record number of wins for any single film in that award’s
history. Though I always stay away from reviews of any film I plan on seeing,
it’s been impossible to not hear the swooning, almost universal praise and
accolades for La La Land.
It is a completely straightforward, unapologetic, sincere
break-into-song, dance-in-the-streets original movie musical. It’s not a
jukebox musical or an adaptation of a book or Broadway show, nor is it a
winking “Dude, isn’t it, like, so retro that we’re, like, dancing?” production
of self-awareness. It is the story of Mia, played by Emma Stone, an aspiring
actress, and Sebastian, a frustrated jazz musician played by Ryan Gosling, who
meet, fall in love, and struggle against the backdrop of 21st century
Hollywood. For the first thirty minutes or so, it comes across as a standard
meet-cute romantic comedy only with songs and sparkling cinematography. Having
heard all the praise for the film, contrarian that I am, I was fully prepared
to dislike it. However, despite my best efforts, I could not. Somewhere around
the planetarium sequence, where Mia and Sebastian wordlessly dance and
literally float around the art deco Griffith Observatory, it became clear both
how committed the film was to its vision of an unabashed musical love story and
how much I was enjoying it.
It’s odd because neither Stone nor Gosling are particularly
strong singers. They’re both passable, workmanlike dancers, and the music,
while lovely, lacks any real showstopper songs. No one element stands out as
the main reason why the film is so pleasurable. The trick, I think, is that
every element accrues over the course of the film. The performances, the camera
work and editing, the setting, the story, the music, the choreography, the
careful but still organic arrangement of every element visible on the screen –
all of it adds up to a total picture of what’s possible with all the tools at
film’s disposal.
All of the film’s technical precision and ambition combine
to tell a story about the frictions and collisions of pursuing love and one’s
dreams at the same time. Mia and Seb encourage and challenge each other as he
pursues his goal of opening a jazz night club and she tries writing her own
one-woman show as a way of becoming a successful actress. At the same time,
they also let each other down and the film shows just how hard it can be to
choose between what you love and who you love.
Much has been made of the ending, which I won’t give away
here. I will say that Mia gets an opportunity to go away to Paris for a movie
that clearly has the potential to be her big break, and that the two of them
have to decide what they are going to do about it as a couple. Beginning from
the scene in which the two of them sit and discuss their options with the rush
of LA traffic in the background, the final fifteen minutes of the movie are
among the most beautiful and moving I’ve seen. Paying tribute to Gene Kelly’s An American in Paris in particular, La La Land goes full Hollywood musical
as it uses an old fashioned dream sequence to explore the destinies of its two
protagonists. It is lovely and heartbreaking in every good way. You should see
it.
