La La Land review

This year’s “La La Land,” a romantic musical that takes place in modern-day Los Angeles, will likely see a lot of love throughout the awards season, and for good reason; it’s fun, it’s vibrant and it lovingly pays homage to the classic Hollywood musicals of the 50s and 60s, while still being accessible for a modern audience. But what makes “La La Land” more than just a cute genre exercise with a chipper cast of likable white people is director Damien Chazelle’s personal obsessions and anxieties that burns through the movie’s standard love story.

We’re first introduced to our romantic leads Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in an ambitious song and dance number that takes place on the freeway during deadlocked LA traffic. Chazelle establishes the long, swooping single-takes that dominate the showier set-pieces of the film, as well as the bright primary color scheme that evokes the eye-popping saturation of early technicolor cinema. Stone plays Mia, an aspiring actress who spends more time at her dead-end studio coffee-shop job than she does on stage or film. Gosling plays Sebastian, a jazz enthusiast who dreams of starting his own traditional night-club, while toiling away as a pianist at a cheap Italian restaurant. After a series of chance meetings in the world’s biggest small town, Mia and Sebastian begin a whirlwind romance that inspires the couple to reach for the stars, but as their personal ambitions inch closer to being realized, the seeds of resentment bud in the soil of their mutual sacrifices.

The best and worst thing you can say about this film is that the story is awfully simple.  The movie’s portrayal of relationship dynamics is very familiar and, generally speaking, the rise and fall structure within romantic comedy hasn’t been properly challenged since Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall.” But “La La Land” thrives on familiarity, both for aesthetic and thematic purposes. The use of Gosling and Stone--previously coupled in “Crazy Stupid Love” and “Gangster Squad”—suggests a classic on-screen couple that you’re already been primed to root for. This kind of metatexual referencing manifests visually to evoke the romantic musicals of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, as well as lesser known world-musicals such as Jacques Demy’s 1964 “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” begging for audience’s enthusiasm in stunning displays of escapism. But just underneath the surface of all of this highly-technical celebration of genre exists a personal story, not about love won and love lost, but of a young artist grappling with a legacy that looms large behind him.

Chazelle was barely 29 years old when he gained a lot of attention for his brilliant psychological drama “Whiplash,” a much darker film about a young jazz musician who’s challenged to the breaking-point by his perfectionist music professor. If we can read that film as a post-adolescent expression of Chazelle’s angst as a young artist that's nearly-destroyed by his own scrutiny, then “La La Land” is the director’s concession and acceptance that his artistic success will likely be measured by those before him and that his work will always stand in the shadows of Hollywood legends.

Singer John Legend plays a successful sell-out musician who I suspect represents a lucrative creative path that Chazelle is hesitant to embark. He asks Gosling’s Sebastian “How are you going to be a revolutionary if you're such a traditionalist?” Given how playful and referential the movie is with its genre trappings, it’s not a stretch to assume that Chazelle might to be asking these questions about artistic integrity to himself. Legend follows this up by saying “You're holding onto the past but jazz is about the future.”  

In progressing from the taut and wiry character study of “Whiplash” to the bombast of a showy cinemascope musical, Chazelle transitions nicely from emotionally interior storytelling to a style that’s deceptively extroverted but equally personal.  Gosling and Stone are posed and positioned in such a way that's flattering and believable but they're subservient to the overall vision of the project. As hard as they perform for their suppers and as good of chemistry they have on-screen, one could argue that the impact of their romantic arc is dampened by the post-modern conversation the filmmaker is having with himself and the audience. That aside, “La La Land” is an earnest crowd-pleaser that is largely designed to entertain on a more inclusive level, transcending the complicated dynamics the director explores within the text, the context and subtext. .

Grade: A-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2017

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "La La Land."