Gosling and Stone will dance into your dreams
La La Land (out of 4) Starring Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, John Legend, J.K. Simmons and Rosemarie DeWitt. Written and directed by Damien Chazelle. Opens Sunday at major theatres. 128 minutes. PG
People say the movie musical is dead. Tell that that to your tapping toes while watching the enchantment of La La Land, one of the year’s best films.
Writer/director Damien Chazelle plunges us straight into his song-anddance mindset from the film’s opening frames. On a traffic-clogged freeway in Los Angeles, bright young things exit their cars and begin to strut their stuff to composer Justin Hurwitz’s peppy original tune “Another Day of Sun.”
So far, so Broadway — but slow down for a second. Chazelle’s candy-coloured salute to L.A., the movies and chasing your dreams isn’t your standard Tinseltown tuner, where production numbers erupt every five minutes.
As he did with Whiplash, his similarly melodious previous picture, Chazelle takes time to count the cost of ambition and to ponder what really qualifies as a Hollywood ending. La La Land delights, like the Gene Kelly and Jacques Demy musicals it tips its hat to, but it’s also grounded in reality.
Caught in L.A.’s gridlock in separate aging vehicles are jazz pianist and L.A. native Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) and aspiring actress Mia (Emma Stone), a Nevada transplant. They’re both in a hurry to be somewhere else, and they’re not amused by the delay or each other, at least not yet.
Middle digits fly. Later, their feet will.
It’s a meet cute, of course, but as another famous song-and-dance man once said, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet — or seen it yet, either. Cinematographer Linus Sandgren makes L.A. look like Wonderland, or maybe Oz.
Sebastian and Emma are both aspiring artists, as their charming singalong numbers “City of Stars” and “Audition (The Fools Who Dream)” attest, also composed by Hurwitz, but their hopes are headed in different directions. Can they meet at an intersection somewhere?
Sebastian’s a serious jazzbo who worships Thelonious Monk, Count Basie and Hoagy Carmichael and hopes to open his own club. He’d rather lose a paying gig — Whiplash’s J.K. Simmons obliges with the boot — than play anything less than “real” music.
Mia is determined to be an actress, despite years of rejections for any but bit parts. She barely makes rent by working at a coffee shop on the Warner Bros. lot, near the make-believe apartment window from which Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman wistfully looked out in Casablanca.
Bogie and Bergman will always have Paris, but it’s no sure thing Sebastian and Mia will always have La La Land, a.k.a. Los Angeles. It’s a place built as much from imagination as from steel and concrete, as Chazelle reminds us with recurring images of a vintage movie theatre, the Rialto, that seems imperilled by progress.
On one of Sebastian and Mia’s early dates, they take in Rebel Without a Cause at the Rialto. The Griffith Observatory from Rebel will be the scene of one of La La Land’s most magical moments, as the two young lovers take such lyrical and metaphorical flight that they dance up into the stars.
And about that dancing — it’s good but not as accomplished as the hoofing of Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse, to say the least. Same goes for the singing, which won’t challenge the smooth pop tones of, say, John Legend (who cameos in the film as a bandleader) or Adele.
That’s a big part of the charm of this movie. La La Land believes not only in dreams, but also in the power of movies to make us want to be part of them.