When the temperature is approaching zero and the skies are
gray, the idea of spending a few hours in sunny Los Angeles might sound like a
good one. And Damien Chazelle's new film, La
La Land, satisfies that urge to a T. It's a quasi-romance on the order of A Star is Born, in which two aspiring
artists fall in love—sort of. It also happens to be a musical. The songs are fairly
catchy, and few human activities have greater power to lift the spirits than
tap-dancing.
The opening number, a ten minute song-and-dance in the midst
of a traffic jam on the LA freeway, appears to be a single take, and it
establishes that this film is going to be full of creativity and whimsy. That
impression is reconfirmed in many places along the way.
In short, La La Land
has enough energy and surprise to dismiss from our minds the notion that it's
striving slavishly to ape some lost film aesthetic. I'm a big fan of Hollywood musicals
(not Broadway musicals) and I've never
seen a film quite like this.
On the other hand, I'll have to admit that the
opening sequence reminded me of a very, very long Target commercial.
In fact, La La Land
is the kind of film in which you often find yourself thinking about the art
director. The colors are super-bright, like a film from Pedro Almodóvar in his
prime, though never to the point of outright garishness. Yet you look at a
turquoise tumbler on a table, and notice how well it harmonizes with the
bathroom curtains. That's not a good sign.
The most serious shortcoming of the film, however, is that the central
romantic entanglement is tepid. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone sustain a sort of antagonistic
humor in the early going, but we don't feel much of an amorous countercurrent. They even
sing a song together as they look out over the lights of Los Angeles in which
they analyze this lack of feeling they share for one another. Anyone familiar
with the energy and tension generated by Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, or by Grant and Hepburn
in Bringing Up Baby, or even by John
Barrymore and Carole Lombard in Twentieth
Century, must find this tone a little troubling. (Judy Garland and Gene
Kelly? Kelly and Rita Hayworth? Grant and Jean Arthur? Astaire and Rogers? The
list goes on and on.)
Gosling is largely to blame. He's sort of glum, and his
repartee has an element of bitterness in it, based on the fact that no one
shares his enthusiasm for mainstream jazz. When he eventually joins a band to start earning some real money, we're supposed to take it as a sell-out to pop commercialism ... but I sort of liked
it. And anyway, musicians such as Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Miles
Davis, and Chick Corea (jazz greats one and all) made the same choice back in
the early 1970s, during the glory years of fusion. Hey! A guy's gotta eat.
Things do start to click between the two eventually, but the strongest impetus they exchange is one of encouragement and self-sacrifice. Gosling
wants Stone to follow her dream, while she wants him to do the same. That's all
very noble, and it might even be wise, but it doesn't generate much entertainment
heat. And neither of these aspiring artists should be surprised that if and when their careers blossom, they
aren't going to be seeing much of each other.
But such concerns, which force us to leave aside superlatives
when discussing La La Land, take
nothing away from the film's value as a divertimento. Singing, dancing, color, romance,
the pursuit of a dream: what's not to like? The ending scenes work, I think,
but what happens "in the end" is less important than what's happening scene by scene, and
this makes La La Land the kind of film that would, I suspect, be very easy to watch more
than once.
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