‘La La Land’ right step in redeeming jazz on film
Music style hasn’t translated well to big screen in some time.
Hollywood never seems to tire of taking on jazz.
Its fifilmmakers mock, distort, demean, misconstrue and, on rare occasions, capture the allure of a most elusive music.
For jazz thrives best not on the screen, where it’s frozen in two dimensions for all time, but in an intimate club, where musicians invent it on the spot for listeners who can lean in to savor it. When the performance ends, the music created on any given night escapes into the ether, never to be heard in the same way again.
The mystery and nocturnal glamour of jazz have seduced Hollywood from the dawn of talkies, when Al Jolson starred as “The Jazz Singer” (1927). But — with a few notable, glorious exceptions — jazz has fared poorly there ever since.
So far as Hollywood is concerned, jazz is the province of sin (the Potterville sequence in It’s a Wonderful Life”), mutants (the bar scene in “Star Wars”), buffoons (Forest Whitaker’s Charlie Parker in “Bird”), nerds (the record collector in “Jerry Maguire”) and thugs (Don Cheadle’s grotesque Miles Davis in “Miles Ahead”).
Perhaps it’s telling that the t wo best jazz films of the past three decades were made not in the United States, where the art form was conceived, but on foreign shores: the elegiac “‘Round Midnight” (1986) was the work of French director Bertrand Tavernier, and the brilliantly animated “Chico & Rita” (2010) was produced in Spain.
This checkered history brings us to “La La Land,” written and directed by Damien Chazelle, who already had given jazz cinema another low point with his pulpy melodrama “Whiplash” (2014). The pop- rock drum-bashing of that film’s overwrought protagonist, as well as the preposterousness of its plot — complete with truck crash, vats of fake blood and a make-or-break Carnegie Hall showdown — illu- minated how little Chazelle either knew or cared about what jazz is. To him, it was but a vehicle for adrenaline-pumping hysterics.
With “La La Land,” Chazelle hasn’t fully atoned for his “Whiplash” sins, but he has gone a very long way toward making amends. For “La La Land” dares to contemplate the place of jazz in American life, a subject not often explored in modern mainstream fifilms, let alone one framed essentially as a Gene Kelly movie musical. On Tuesday, the movie was nominated for a record-tying 14 Oscar nominations, including two in the Original Song category.
Jazz lovers may wince when the fifilm’s jazz-pianist protagonist,
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