La La Land

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 21^st 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.