YOU’LL L-L-LOVE LA LA LAND
Uplifting, charming and sweetly romantic, this old school Hollywood musical is a pure joy
La La Land (12A) Verdict: Upbeat, feel-good, wonderful ★★★★✩ Manchester By The Sea (15) Verdict: Downbeat, feel-bad, wonderful ★★★★✩
THESE days, movies by Hollywood about Hollywood tend to be biting satires or solemn biopics.
So it’s surprisingly refreshing to float through a film as calculatingly and upliftingly lightweight as La La Land, the romantic musical which swept the board at the Golden Globes on Sunday night.
One of the film’s seven awards went to Damien Chazelle, the indecently young writer- director (he turns 32 next week), who was nominated for an Academy Award for 2014’ s arresting Whiplash.
La La Land has some of the same themes — jazz, mainly — but just as Whiplash had you sitting forward in your seat, electrified, so this film lets you slump back, allowing its abundant charm to wash over you.
It begins with a daft but exuberant crowd singalong, erupting out of gridlock on a Los Angeles freeway.
Stuck in the jam are Mia (Emma Stone), an aspiring actress and playwright on her way to her unfulfilling job in a cafe on the Warner Brothers lot, and Seb (Ryan Gosling), a brilliant, improvisational jazz pianist earning a dispiriting living by playing workaday standards in a swanky restaurant.
FOLLOWInGa fleeting angry exchange on the freeway, they have another brief encounter on the night Seb is fired from his piano job by the restaurant manager (a cameo for J. K. Simmons, already propelled to late- career, Oscar-winning stardom by Chazelle, who cast him as the tyrannical jazz teacher in Whiplash).
But it is not until they meet properly at a party that romantic sparks begin to fly between Mia and Seb, which in a film like this means a song-anddance number deliberately evocative of any number of musicals from Hollywood’s golden age.
And while Gosling and Stone are no Fred and Ginger, they’re no slouches, either. For a moment, Seb hangs off a lamppost just like Gene Kelly in Singin’ In The Rain, another musical about Hollywood. The reference does him no disservice.
So later, when Mia says of the onewoman play she’s writing that ‘it feels really nostalgic to me, are people going to like it?’ you kind of know those were also Chazelle’s sentiments about his film. He didn’t need to worry. Thunderous triumph at the Globes usually indicates that a clutch of Oscars will follow. La La Land is box-office gold.
The two leads are both wonderful,
radiating real chemistry even though there’s nothing much more to the story than the will they, won’t they of their love affair, and the will they, won’t they of their respective careers. He wants to open his own jazz club, but can’t even hold down a steady job. She wants to be in the movies, but is worn down by the brutal audition process.
So, above all, this is a film about hopes and dreams, about the difference between a humdrum existence in Los Angeles and a fantasy life in the titular ‘la la land’. At over two hours it could perhaps be a little shorter, but it seems cruel to carp about a picture so pleasurable that even a smoke alarm comes as a horribly shrill interruption.
Actually, noise is the one concession Chazelle makes to the modern day, lacing his nostalgia trip with the sounds of the 21st century: smoke alarms, mobile ringtones, beeping car horns. His la la land is not mired completely in the past.
That said, I left the cinema with that lingering, old-fashioned sense of escapism brought on by all the best musicals. La La Land isn’t perfect, but it’s still an absolute joy.
MANCHESTER By The Sea is anything but. Even 11 months from now it might still be the least joyous film of 2017, as relentlessly feel-bad, or at any rate feel- sad, as La La Land is feel-good. So if one doesn’t make you cry, the other surely will.
Kenneth Lonergan’s film, which also received some recognition at Sunday’s awards ceremony, is his third as a writer-director.
The previous two, You Can Count On Me (2000) and Margaret (2011), were both forensically brilliant studies of complex relationships within seemingly ordinary families.
Manchester By The Sea offers more of the same, but with an added dollop of unimaginable tragedy. At the heart of the narrative is Lee Chandler, exquisitely played by Casey Affleck, whose Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama, come the end of awards season, surely won’t be the only statuette on his mantelpiece. Or at the back of a cupboard, more likely. He seems to be an unshowy sort of cove, less easy in the limelight than big brother Ben.
His character is an unsmiling handyman responsible for the maintenance of four apartment blocks in a Boston suburb. He knows that one resident fancies him, and that another finds him intolerably rude.
Yet for Lee there is no distinction. He doesn’t care how the world sees him, because he is distanced from it by his own inner demons. The only vague, dead-eyed fun he derives from life is by starting fist fights in bars.
It takes a while to find out where those demons came from, why he is so emotionally wounded. A series of flashbacks show that he wasn’t always like this, but clubbable, roguishly charming.
WHEnLee gets a phone call telling him that his older brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) has died, he returns to Manchester, the small Massachusetts seaside town where he grew up, where his ex- wife Randi (Michelle Williams, sparingly used but also brilliant) still lives, and where strangers point him out to each other as Lee Chandler.
Why? Was he a high-school football legend? If only. He can’t wait to leave his home town again, but he has a problem; his brother has made him legal guardian of his son, 16year-old Patrick (Lucas Hedges). This is tricky for both of them.
They had a decent relationship when Patrick was young, and they are both grieving for Joe, but Patrick is everything Lee is not. Though prone to losing his temper in ice-hockey games, he is outgoing and popular. All he wants is to play hockey, play in his band and have sex with not one girlfriend, but two.
This dynamic, the fractious lack of understanding between uncle and nephew, might be enough to carry the drama alone. But there is something else, a cataclysm in Lee’s past so overwhelming that it continues to suck the life out of him.
Very cleverly, Lonergan doesn’t let huge emotions get in the way of everyday banalities. Lee gets cross because he can’t recall where he parked his car. A friend at Joe’s funeral wants to know whether he has eaten. This humdrum passage of life, even with the plaintive choral music that makes up much of the score, helps to make the drama feel grippingly real.
However, it never grips more than in one exchange between Lee and Randi that is among the most searingly moving encounters I’ve ever seen in the cinema, and deserves an acting and writing award all on its own.