Review: La La Land
Rhapsodic. Rapturous. Magical. Dazzling. Masterpiece. These are the words one wishes to ascribe to La La Land, writer-director Damien Chazelle's colour-drenched musical valentine to Hollywood, its dreaming denizens, and the moviegoers who wish to be swept away and lose themselves in the power of those celluloid images. And yet...those words don't wholly apply. For a film whose intentions are so well-defined, its very rigour exposes its artifice, resulting in a jumbled shallowness that it never truly overcomes.
Set in contemporary Los Angeles but very much anchored in the past, the film wastes no time in staging a musical number, one that finds drivers stuck on a typically congested freeway during another hot day breaking out into a song and dance that finds the dancers twirling, leaping and turning between and atop cars as cinematographer Linus Sandgren captures it all in one long take. For all its exuberance, however, this piece already features the problem that pervades all of La La Land's musical numbers - the joy it emits isn't borne out of spontaneity. It feels too manufactured, too rehearsed, the choreography is so pronounced that could probably count off the beats, if one were so inclined.
The sequence does end on a comic note. The people may have been singing and dancing about "Another Day of Sun" but, as the title card notes, it is wintertime in Los Angeles and Chazelle introduces us to two particular people on that freeway. One is Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a jazz pianist raging against the dying of jazz's light. He's not one for compromise or even listening - so apostolic is he in his worship of free jazz that he barely tolerates his employer's demands to adhere to the set list. Gosling in recent years has refined one of the best deadpan mugs - he may not be on par with Buster Keaton, but he's certainly hovering in the vicinity - and one of the few genuine pleasures to be found in La La Land is to see the expression of murderous tolerance on Sebastian's face as he's forced to perform Christmas standards for an inattentive crowd or, horror of horrors, be a synth keyboardist for an Eighties cover band. His ultimate dream is to open up a jazz club, one where musicians can play whatever they want, however they want - forget about kowtowing to commercialist demands.
The other figure of note on that freeway is Mia, an aspiring actress working as a barista in a coffee shop on the Warner Brothers lot in between round after round of dispiriting auditions. She's a star waiting to be born, a state no longer applicable to the saucer-eyed Stone whose combination of verve, moxie and melancholy recalls Shirley MacLaine. Stone is so emotionally expressive that she almost makes one forget that Mia is less a character than a symbol of a passionate striver living in a town that practically draws its existence on crushing the life out of such people.
Of course, Sebastian and Mia are perfect for one another and, for a time, it's engaging to observe them falling in love and eventually becoming mired in the darker realities of their ambitions. Chazelle provides them with moments that read as swoon-worthy on the page: the push-and-pull courtship under the streetlights that plainly references Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse's "Strangers in the Night" pas de deux from The Band Wagon; a waltz in the Griffith Observatory that finds the couple literally amongst the planetarium's stars. And yet...these sequences never truly soar. In many respects, the film works best when it loosens its tether on its inspirations and uses those inspirations as a springboard rather than a rigid template. The portion of the film that finds the couple's romance threatened by Sebastian's rise as a member of a jazz-pop band called The Messengers is nearly wordless, the structure giving itself almost entirely to freeform.
Best of all is a number set during the film's coda, a lavish set piece that encapsulates everything that has unfolded in the past two hours in one perfect musical sequence that marries the big-scale musical stylings of a Vincente Minnelli to the bittersweet wistfulness of a Jacques Demy. It's a moment that has an actual release and one wishes that there were more such moments throughout the film. One has to applaud Chazelle for his efforts even if the work itself is ultimately disappointing.
La La Land
Directed by: Damien Chazelle
Written by: Damien Chazelle
Starring: Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling, J.K. Simmons, Finn Wittrock, Rosemarie DeWitt, John Legend, Tom Everett Scott, Meagen Fay, Sonoya Mizuno
