Can ‘La La Land’ Make the Musical Matter Again?
LOS ANGELES — This must have been what it was like to watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers during the Great Depression.
In “La La Land,” the director Damien Chazelle has a shot at something that has eluded auteurist titans like Peter Bogdanovich and Francis Ford Coppola: to make musicals matter again. For decades, the genre that helped Hollywood’s golden age glitter has been sputtering.
A musical with big numbers, intimate reveries and adult feelings, “La La Land” is a boy-meetsgirl tale with early 21st- century rhythms. It grapples with love between equals in a story about an aspiring actress, Mia (Emma Stone), who meets an ambitious musician, Sebastian ( Ryan Gosling), Los Angeles- style during a traffic jam on a freeway: He honks his horn at her; she gives him the finger. It takes a while for them to get together — they meet, they retreat, repeat — only to end up swaying in that fading, soft- light time known as the magic hour. After another encounter, they at last move as one — s’wonderful, as Fred Astaire crooned.
Musicals break from the dos and don’ts of life, suggesting the possibility that everyone can move to her own beat. It’s enormously pleasing when an evening stroll turns into a rhythmic saunter, then bursts into dance — think of Gene Kelly singing in the rain.
When Mr. Chazelle was at Harvard University, he was studying Alfred Hitchcock, the French New Wave, and the American avant-gardewhen, for the first time, he saw Astaire and Rogers cheek to cheek in “Top Hat.” “Suddenly, I started thinking of them as experimental movies in mainstream garb,” Mr. Chazelle said. “That was the initial thing where I woke up and went, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been sleeping on a gold mine.’ ”
Mr. Chazelle became obsessed with Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s “It’s Always Fair Weather,” and started on his senior thesis film, which became his feature directorial debut, “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench,” a near-musical.
“La La Land,” which is being re- leased worldwide this month and next, integrates its numbers as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a guy to tap- dance on a park bench or a woman to dream herself into a waltz. Throughout, Mr. Chazelle engages distinct genre tropes — the not- quite- touching dance, the constantly interrupted kiss, the miracle of synchronicity — to playful effect, allowing him to transform the everyday into what he calls the dramatically or comically “epic.”
With the choreographer Mandy Moore, Mr. Chazelle worked with what Mr. Gosling and Ms. Stone brought with them. He also showed them favorites like “The Band Wagon” and Jacques Demy’s “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.” Together they tried to find “the little weird idiosyncrasies” of their characters’ body language, Mr. Chazelle said, “and then build numbers out of that.” There are various reasons the American film musical fell out of favor, including the transformation of the old studio system and changing audience tastes, behaviors and more. We stopped dancing, except at clubs and parties; the film musical grew grim and then grimmer. Women’s liberation and changing gender relations confused Hollywood — and still do. The movie industry excels at recycling genres, stories and stereotypes, but it hasn’t been adept at making them work with emancipated women, who no longer need men to have their happily ever after.
Musicals are for idealists. One of the pleasures of classic film musicals is the chance to watch bodies become extraordinary — strolling and then singing and soaring.
“I find it wonderful that in the same era in Hollywood as screwball comedies,” Mr. Chazelle said, “where everything was about this patter and conversations building to certain catharsis with a couple — that this series of musicals was able to do its version of that, but without any words at all and just with dancing.”
While “La La Land” engages with nostalgia, it also speaks to the present just by asking whether it’s possible (finally) for a romantically involved woman and man to get past the struggle for reciprocity. We know men and women can go toe to toe, but can they still dance cheek to cheek?