Director: Damien Chazelle
Writer(s): Damien Chazelle
Starring: Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling, John Legend
It's been a while since I've written a movie review. Let's look at something great.
As one can probably tell from the majority of the movie reviews on this blog, I deeply admire the MGM musicals of the 1950s, as well as the Golden Age of musical theatre in general. After all, I did write an entire month's worth of reviews on the screen adaptations of the great Rodgers and Hammerstein productions. When I look over the majority of modern musicals - particularly those films marketed and produced by the Walt Disney Corporation (Into the Woods, Frozen) - I find them lacking in polish, craft, virtuosity, and elegance. They simply are not comparable to the 50s classics. I doubted whether Hollywood would ever dare to put on another production of such scale as those early musicals ever again. Along comes La La Land: an unashamedly colorful and vibrant original musical filmed in Cinemascope and inspired by the music of George Gershwin and Cole Porter. On that ground alone, I would have been a fan. Yet La La Land makes a move that not only earns my undying respect, but also outright astonished me. This is the first film I've seen in years that actually made me cry in the theatre, for its ending is one of the most perfect denouements in musical history.
Mia (Emma Stone) is a would-be actress working a full-time gig as a barista. Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) is a struggling jazz pianist intent on restoring jazz to cultural prominence. The two meet up after Mia overhears Sebastian playing in a particularly unctuous restaurant owned by a J.K. Simmons cameo. Conflicting egos at first bring them to squabbling, but Sebastian's boundless ambitions and Mia's performative charm eventually draw them together. However, the costs of the South Californian lifestyle quickly encroach upon their happiness. How will Mia and Sebastian's relationship adapt to economic realities? The answer, while not surprising, is certainly touching.
On a purely musical level, La La Land is not quite as virtuosic as the MGM musicals that inspired it. Damien Chazelle did not hire singers who could act, but actors who could "sing" - a habit which ordinarily would not work to a musical's favor. Both Gosling and Stone sound rusty, more often flat than on-pitch and lacking any and all diaphragm support. Heck, even in her most emotional number, Emma Stone is singing purely from her throat. Melodic lines are constantly petering out, and a number of lines don't satisfy. Even the choreography has flaws, what with the tap sounds of the dance sequence in the film's third song clearly being edited in post. The first two songs in the show are also practically identical, having the same harmonic progression and emotional tenor, both being garish, gaudy, high-octane, pep rallies that many viewers might find obnoxious if not outright insulting.
Yet it works.
The mistakes in La La Land's musical craft are obvious and intentional, as nearly all of them build into the structure of the narrative. Vulnerabilities of technique are equated with vulnerabilities of character. Mia and Sebastian are not Don Lockwood and Kathy Selden; they are neither conventional Hollywood protagonists nor role models for moral behavior. They are naïve, egocentric, hypocritical, excessively passionate, and emotionally inconsistent - just like the audience members. They merely happen to express those vulnerabilities and flaws throughs songs rather than snarky text messages. Sure, actual musical theatre actors could communicate these same vulnerabilities without betraying technique, but the flawlessness of their craft would make them less appealing. Most people aren't trained dancers and singers. Since La La Land strives to put the audience into the protagonists' place rather than prop them up as paragons of moral and artistic behavior, the vocal and dancing flaws actually work to the movie's advantage rather than its detriment.
Even the repetitiveness of the first two songs works. Musical numbers in La La Land (and in good musical theatre as a whole) are the vehicles through which we understand characters' perception of reality. Though the identical harmonic structures of "Another Day of Sun" and "Someone in the Crowd" would be game-breaking for some, both of these numbers are taken from Mia's perspective. She's a budding actress surrounded by people more talented, attractive, and charismatic than she is. Of course she'd perceive every waking moment as an overly colorful unseemly reminder of her lack of talent as compared to everyone else. Her musical moments in those numbers are subdued and unimportant, with her constantly being one-upped by extras. It's only when she's introduced to Sebastian's music, a stark contrast to her "normal," that the score changes. Harmonic variety is introduced, the chord changes mirroring the character changes. Two of the songs - "City of Stars" and "Audition" - are genuinely compelling in the way that the first two numbers decidedly are not. La La Land recognizes the crucial relationship between music and narrative, and Mia's relationship to the score emphasizes this element of musical form.
Speaking of Mia, let's discuss Emma Stone. Having admired her roles in films such as Magic in the Moonlight and Birdman, I've become somewhat of a fan of her work. Heck, Emma Stone was the only truly redemptive element in the Amazing Spiderman films. Oddly enough, though, Stone's effectiveness in La La Land has little to do with her actual acting ability. Sure, she sings, dances, monologues, cries, laughs, mugs, but any actress could have done those things. Why couldn't, say, Rachel McAdams have done well in same role? Simple: unlike most other contemporary actresses, Emma Stone knows how to manipulate the camera better than anyone else. Emma Stone's expressive, almost Disney-esque eyes serve to draw the audience into almost every frame; she's practically objectifying herself. However, this objectification serves not to demean but to enhance her character. Emma Stone calls upon classic Hollywood models of objectification and turns them on their head; just like Ingrid Bergman, Marilyn Monroe, and Nicole Kidman before her, Stone presents herself as a larger than life figure posing before the camera. Yet it's not Emma Stone whose posing: it's Mia. Mia, who, according the film, grew up on classic movies, is constantly acting. Throughout the film's first act, one can never quite tell when she's being authentic or merely putting on another mask, transforming into another image of herself, for casting directors, her boss, or even her friends. She's a method actor, to be sure: there's always something inherently personal to her public personae. But we never quite get to see Mia drop her act until a third of the way into the film. Emma Stone's ability to turn her gaze away from the camera is her most potent technique throughout the film and it makes Mia one of the most complex and rich characters in recent film memory. While other stars may have turned in more powerhouse performances this year, few required the subtlety of this one.
Ryan Gosling isn't quite up to par with Stone, as his natural charm is tied down by the negative attributes of the character he plays. Sebastian is not a good person: he's pretentious, obstinate, naïve, and frustrating. Heck, he's not even an excellent musician. Gosling's "love" for jazz, his mantra within the film, is little but cursory fandom. He fetishizes jazz paraphernalia but he doesn't really develop a particularly profound theory. He doesn't discuss the impact of any particular jazz recordings or delve into the intricacies of the jazz ethos. His explanation of the genre to Mia is shallow, at best, and wholly inauthentic, only supplemented by the fact that he is not African-American and lacks a cultural connection to the music. His ambitions are checked not by reality, but by a cynicism towards modern culture that smacks of the worst elements of Holden Caulfield-esque appeals to "authenticity." He longs for a yesteryear that never really existed. Nonetheless, the character works insofar as he brings out the better elements in Mia, allowing her to break out of the constraint of her circle of friends. More importantly, he's a character who changes for the worse within the film's diegesis but for the better for the film's dialectic. Sebastian showcases more natural ability than those around him, but he more often than not squanders it. As compared to the evasive Mia, he's honest to a fault, much like his key literary model, Alceste from Moliere's The Misanthrope. While Mia grows to embrace Sebastian's positive elements - ambition, sincerity, energy - Sebastian doesn't so much adopt Mia's better traits amiability, modesty, and earnestness. The film also shifts towards a focus on Sebastian towards its end, the implication being that if Mia is who we want to be, Sebastian is who we are.
Let's cut to the chase. This is a SAD movie. One will not see the heroes riding their Prius off into the sunset with "the end" scrawling across the screen a la the original MGM musicals. These characters don't deserve a storybook ending. Their individual arcs are complete and the ending is undeniably conclusive, but the emotional arc is left ambiguous. Pending on how one enters the movie, one may or may not find the conclusion personally enjoyable: I've encountered a number of people, who, expecting a traditional MGM ending, hated this film and hated its ending. Others found the journey fruitless, as we have followed two individuals for two hours and not necessarily gotten what we wanted. They feel cheated, as if the movie forgot its purpose.
Yet I think these negative perspectives seem to have missed the point of the film entirely. For, as interesting and engaging as Mia and Sebastian's love story is, La La Land isn't about them at all. They are, as all fictional characters are, a device to explore elements of universe. Moreover, La La Land's chief concern is not even about romance and love. La La Land's chief concern is the role of music in our lives: its beauty, its elegance, its mutability, and, most important of all, its transience. La La Land isn't just a musical; it's a deconstruction of the audience's relationship with musicals.
To get a fuller sense of La La Land's commentary, we must analyze the form of the modern American musical itself and the history of MGM American films. Musicals, much like opera, operate under logic incommensurate with our reality; the expression of passion through song is contrary to our everyday experiences. Intermittent song and dance numbers would interrupt the social order and send civilization as we know it into disarray; see Buffy the Vampire Slayer's "Once More, with Feeling" for evidence. Indeed, many audience members cannot summon a suspension of disbelief permitting actors to break into song and thus repudiate musical dramas. This phenomenon has contributed to the decline of opera as a hallmark of Western culture. The American musical, post-Rodgers and Hammerstein, differs from opera in one key aspect: not all of the drama is contained within song. Interruptions to the musical flow are to be expected, to the point where sung-through shows such as Les Miserables, Next to Normal, Rent, and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street skirt the definition of the modern musical entirely. In the American musical, musical numbers are a departure from reality rather than the essence of reality. Music becomes the entryway into personal development no external person could observe under normal conditions. The songs take us outside of the world and into the character. They are but moments: intense, moving, yet fleeting.
The MGM musicals offered a dream-like quality perfect for this model of the musical. They were colorful to an almost gaudy degree; on the pure production end, monochromatic costume colors and the like were industry standards so as to make primitive lighting and camera design more effective, but the sheer vibrancy of these flashy colors coupled with the elegance of the performers' moving bodies created the image of watercolors in motion. Studio backgrounds were equally colorful yet often vaguely defined, adding to the dream-like aesthetic of the films. Throw in the moral simplicity of the tales - often so simple as to make Aesop wince - and one had the film equivalent of fairy tales. As the musicals' popularity declined, these films entered the public's memory, becoming the fairy tales they depicted. Just like each song interrupted the reality of the film's diegetic universe, each film interrupted the universe of the audience member. Instead of merely depicting musical moments, the films became musical moments.
Damien Chazelle and La La Land not only understand this theory of musical film-making, but they add a new dimension: what happens when the music ends?. Certainly, each musical number incorporates the aesthetics of the classic musicals - the monochromatic costumes, the misty backgrounds, the extended dance sequences - but the most important element is the ending. Every musical number in La La Land ends abruptly and harshly: "Another Day of Sun" ends with the honking of guitar horns, "Someone In the Crowd" with Mia getting her car towed, "A Lovely Night" with a beeper, "City of Stars" with a decline in romantic intimacy, "Audition" with Mia's voice cracking. All of these harsh comedowns culminate with a hard cut in the film's final musical number so punishing yet thematically satisfying that I dare not spoil it. The driving nuance of these comedowns is clear: not only must these musical moments end, but, in the worst cases, they are aberrations from actual living. When the characters get wrapped up in their musical numbers, they aren't merely transported into their own world; they are ignoring everything else around them and getting trapped in their own conceit. Coming back to the reality is thus agonizing for everyone. The audience has a similar experience. When one finishes watching Singin' in the Rain, one's life doesn't end. One has to get up, turn the movie off, pop the DVD out of the player, and go finish filing those taxes. Music can be a giant distraction. The same idea holds for romantic passion: Emma and Sebastian get so drunk on their own happiness that they fail to see the cracks in both their daily routines and in their very relationship.
However, the mere fact that music and passions are momentary and fleeting doesn't make them any less beautiful, meaningful, or important. Musical cues bring about the most important character shifts for both Mia and Sebastian, gradually making both of them better people by the film's conclusion. The scene in which Mia abandons her shallow boyfriend in favor of asking out Sebastian at the end of the film's first act is triggered by her hearing a song on the radio. The final five minutes of the film consist of a sequence chock full of cinema allusions, dazzling palette shifts, stunning choreography, astounding cinematography, and the greatest lift in an original cinema score since the key change in "Beauty and the Beast." To deny the wondrous nature of these musical moments is to be truly soulless. Indeed, La La Land suggests that these transcendent musical experiences are universal; in the very first scene, we hear dozens of people listening to different types of music on their radio, with the implicit suggestion that one could follow any one of their stories and see how music plays a role in their lives. These musical moments may represent what life couldn't be, nay, shouldn't be, but they are, in their way, the most tender waking dreams we experience. While watching La La Land, I truly stepped into one.
La La Land is a beautiful movie, not because of its score, its actors, its cinematography, or its direction: it's a beautiful movie because it understands itself and its impact on the viewer. Damien Chazelle has already demonstrated his tact in composing self-aware and incisive films; Whiplash was a spectacular film in its own right, a horror film whose most frightening character is not the abusive teacher but the Frankenstein's monster of a student. Yet La La Land has raised the bar for all subsequent film musicals. I've seen the other major nominees for Best Picture this year, and none of them even come close to approaching La La Land in terms of universality of emotional impact, cinematic craft, or thematic complexity. It is a masterpiece not for its score, its visuals, or its direction, but for its ideas. It is the best movie I have ever reviewed on this blog.
I give La La Land a 9.5 out of 10.
