‘La La Land’ brings the rhythm of a musical but doesn’t surrender to it
All of the optics regarding “La La Land” prepared me to love the film.
The leads — Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone — are good at their jobs and likable, and I enjoy Los Angeles greatly as a place to visit and as a backdrop. I’ve come to admire musicals, even if true affinity remains at arm’s length. I also enjoy films that don’t look and sound like their peers, which this one did not. And I’m impressed when these oddballs become modest underdogs. Box Office Mojo has “La La Land” at nearly $120 million in box-office returns against a budget of $30 million. That’s a nice success story. But I left the theater feeling empty, when I expected joy. So did my wife, which is far more telling. Her appreciation for musicals has few equals.
As “La La Land” bulldozed other films at the Golden Globes and prepares to do likewise at the Academy Awards, I’m still picking through the film trying to find the root of my disconnect. And I think it has to do with what “La La Land” is and what it is not.
To make a great musical requires either surrendering fully to the form or reinventing it. “La La Land” did neither. It instead played like an indie-rock version of a musical: a little muted and understated and far too aware of its cool choice of shoes.
The opening traffic scene is grandly ambitious, though such an obvious homage to “The Young Girls of Rochefort” as to dim its magic somewhat.
At the risk of sounding terribly cynical, I kept hearing faux pitch meetings between director Damien Chazelle and the studio.
Exec: “You’ve had some success, and while our business is not exclusively tit for tat — we care about art! — it has earned you a line of creative credit. So what do you wish to do next, old chap?” Chazelle: “A musical!” Exec: “A musical?!?” Chazelle: “A big, bright musical with singing and dancing and pretty people, and the whole thing will be a love letter to Los Angeles.” Exec: “Story?” Chazelle: “Beh.” Exec: “Budget?” Chazelle: “Not much!” Exec: “Well, hop to it!” So he did. And “La La Land” is a musical for a good part of its run time.
And then something happens. It quits being a musical and becomes a dour relation- ship film.
After the first two or three musical numbers, which are formidable, the most memorable piece of music is the beautifully melancholy piano figure that drifts in and out of the film like a storm cloud. Though an evocative and moving piece of composition, that piano figure? It’s an indie-rock maneuver.
And the spell is broken. The fairly obnoxious theme involving the white knight protecting the sanctity of jazz smacks of clique-ish self-importance. These little problems obscured by the film’s early grandiosity no longer have cover.
When the song-and-dance moments disappear, you’re left with two actors selling a fairly traditional him/her romance arc
Stone and Gosling likely worked their asses off for months to pull off half of a song-and-dance movie, but despite the lazy Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers comparisons, they can’t awe and envelop a viewer the way old-school musical leads — who spent their entire lives dancing — could.
So by film’s end, what’s left? Grand-scale posturing and a sad and evocative little piano figure that is the movie’s truthful core. You’re left with “The Artist,” a stunning and stylish modern approximation of something from the past, and another Oscar darling from 2011.
But the thing about stunning is the effect wears off. Then you find a film trapped in a void between innovation and nostalgia, two approaches to art that evoke strong feelings, both positive and negative.
“La La Land” didn’t evoke strong feelings for me either way, and that’s the most damning thing I can say about it. I’m aware of some “La La Land” backlash, though I’ve avoided reading it, and I don’t wish to swim in that stream. In a binary world of like/don’t like, I liked the film.
But for all its effort to tap and twinkle its way to some deeper emotion, I didn’t love it.