DAZZLING MUSICAL HOMAGE
La La Land hits all the right notes
Musically trained and passionate, Damien Chazelle has gone from the dark to the light in two films with a jazz theme — Whiplash and La La Land.
And as much as I liked the first, the Ryan Gosling/Emma Stone musical La La Land is a thing of beauty and an impressive way to announce that you ain’t seen nothing yet. Wonderfully conceived and filmed, with winning acting performances and all-in musical ones, La La Land is a naturalistic take on that great American tradition, the romantic musical.
The lighthearted movie deftly surmounts the artificiality of the form — the jarring reality of people breaking into song — by giving every performance context.
And it embraces the musical’s greatest strength, moving the plot along and conveying emotion through tunes more efficiently than words.
In short, it pays homage to a tradition of movie musicals — wearing its heart on its sleeve about the “City of Stars” Los Angeles — while making it relevant by regularly pulling back and concentrating on the narrative.
But for all its lightness of touch, La La Land opens with a bang — with an ambitious and exuberant musical number set in and amid a Los Angeles freeway traffic jam. Despite the size and noise of that opening, its function in the movie is simple — to allow our two lovebirds to “meet cute.”
Mia (Stone) is an aspiring actress whose life is a daily nightmare of uninterested auditions and questioned dreams (there’s a hilarious montage of horrible auditions — including casting directors taking phone calls during emotional scenes or shouting “Thank you!” after a single word).
Sebastian (Gosling) is a principled young jazz pianist, the kind of uncompromising, clear-eyed crusader for “truth” who seems doomed to starving artistry for his unwillingness to compromise.
Which is the cool thing about Mia’s and Seb’s relationship.
After you get past the cute, their relationship is all about art — her unformed principles, and his hard ones that invariably fall prey to a paycheque (offered up by a successful jazz-fusion artist, played by John Legend, who offers Seb a lucrative sellout gig).
In between these revelations and stimulating exchanges, Chazelle offers up images and songs that would be corny if they weren’t so sincere.
Our couple sing and dance through beloved L.A. backdrops like the Watts Towers and Griffith Observatory (where the projected stars actually make them look as if they’re gliding through space).
For all that, there’s nothing romcom about this love story.
Mia and Seb’s relationship shifts with each of their failures and successes.
Its success is as in doubt as the chance of “making it.”
Stone and Gosling are utterly believable in every phase of that relationship and twist of the narrative. Their ease with each other is one of the key reasons La La Land is such a crowd-pleasing movie. I have yet to meet someone who’s watched it and come out in a bad mood.