La La Land: A Review

Now that politics is too depressing/terrifying to think about, I'm taking a cultural turn and doing a movie review.  

I accept that there are people who dislike musicals, but I don’t really understand it.  I can understand musicals being something a person could take or leave but actually disliking them?  I suppose there are people who are immune to the cuteness of baby elephants, too.  As I was brought up on musicals, I have a soft spot for them so I was hopeful that La La Land, the new musical by director Damien Chazelle, with the singing and the dancing plus the general, all-purpose swoony-ness of Ryan Gosling paired once again with the very talented Emma Stone, would live up to the expectations raised by a well-cut trailer. 

The story is a basic boy-meets-girl set in Los Angeles. Los Angeles is cast in the role of dream factory.  The boy in question is Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a piano playing jazz purist who wants to open the perfect jazz club.  The girl is Mia, played by Emma Stone.  Mia is an aspiring actress who has a day job as a barista on a movie lot.  They meet, have some spiky banter about the merits of I Ran by a Flock of Seagulls, before using the medium of dance to find Mia’s car (how does a struggling actress afford a Prius incidentally?) and later waltzing round LA's Griffith Observatory, all of which results in them falling in love.  But as is so often the case, crossed purposes intrude on Sebastian and Mia’s romance.  Hope that’s not a spoiler.  Anyway, it’s all very romantic.  Really, it is and I’m easily nauseated by twee movie romance (you know that scene in Jerry Maguire, the “you complete me” scene?  I rolled my eyes at that scene.  I didn’t find Titanic romantic either, probably because of all the people drowning).

I really wanted La La Land to live up to the hype and while it is delightful, there is a feeling of something missing.  I wanted it to soar and be swept up in it and I wasn’t.  Granted I may not have been in the best mood for a bright, frothy musical - I went to the cinema on the hottest day of Brisbane’s summer and it turned out the rest of Brisbane’s population had the same idea, hence crowds, queues, struggling air con and having to sit right up the front. My crankiness had subsided a bit but not entirely by the end of the exuberant opening dance number.  The problem isn't with the music and songs (written by Chazelle’s uni chum, Justin Hurwitz; lyrics by Benj Pacek and Justin Paul) - I was humming a couple of the tunes after wards. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone both sing well (Emma Stone is the better singer of the two and her final audition scene is a highlight of the film).  

Ryan Gosling has said they had watched Singing in the Rain a lot for inspiration while making La La Land.  As it happened, I had watched it a couple of days before I saw La La Land, as my own little tribute to Debbie Reynolds who had passed away.  It offers a clue as to what was lacking in La La Land.  Singing in the Rain had the central romance between Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) and Cathy Seldon (Debbie Reynolds), but it was set against the transition from silent movies to talkies (a very momentous event in Hollywood history).  It had the other plotline of making then rescuing a movie plus the added drama of Cathy having to secretly dub the sqeaky-voiced prima donna, Lina Lamont, memorably played by Jean Hagen.  There is also the show stopping Make ’Em Laugh number by Donald O’Connor.  

It is probably unfair to compare any film to a masterpiece like Singing in the Rain, but La La Land’s storyline focuses almost completely on Mia and Sebastian's relationship and their respective career decisions and even then Sebastian’s career travails are given more heft than Mia’s which seem more perfunctorily portrayed (that’s me using my feminist voice).  There is a theme running through it about the price of dreams or ambitions but as storylines go, La La Land’s is slight.  There are other characters who help the narrative along but they aren’t really fleshed out.  Examples: Mia has three flatmates but I’m not sure we actually find out their names.  JK Simmonds, who won an Oscar for Damien Chazelle’s previous film Whiplash, makes a cameo appearance as Sebastian’s boss but really the character could have been played by any actor.  With a subplot and some better drawn supporting characters La La Land might have lived up to the hype.

(Similarly Whiplash also centred almost entirely on the two main characters, except it didn’t really matter because the story was basically a contest to the figurative and almost literal death between two obsessive musicians.) 

But just because it doesn’t quite soar doesn’t mean there is nothing to recommend it.  It is lovely, escapist and unashamedly romantic.  Stone and Gosling earn their Oscar nominations (what’s that? They haven’t been announced?  Consider them both sure things).  As does Damien Chazelle if only for the audacity of making an original movie musical when superhero franchises are clogging the cinemas.  If you don’t like musicals, it won’t convert you but if you don’t mind a bit of song and dance, see it and enjoy.  At the session I went to, some of the audience applauded at the end. Actually I feel like I've shot Bambi for finding fault at all. A smidgen under four stars out of five.