Movie Review: La La Land

La La Land is a moving, melancholy musical that’s very pleasant, if a bit thin; not unlike its appealing leads' voices.

Bigger, more established directors than 31-year-old upstart Damien Chazelle have been undone by their aspirations to revive the old-school Hollywood musical.

Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York, Francis Ford Coppola’s One From The Heart and Herbert Ross’ Pennies From Heaven have one major thing in common, other than forcing ill-equipped actors to sing, against all reasonable advice: audiences rejected them, full-throatedly.

Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, but that’s never bothered Chazelle, who spent much of his previous projects, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench and Whiplash, trying to convince us that jazz is still a hip, happening thing, baby. This guy is a one-man suicide squad.

Or, at least he would be, if it wasn’t for the fact that he continually makes magic. Chazelle’s audacity evades hubris for one reason and one reason only: he’s that good.

It helps, however, that his original musical, La La Land (which he also wrote), features regular scene-partners Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, who work their own kind of alchemy. Even if their songs stank up the screen (they don’t) it’s would still be great fun to watch them flirt.

Stone plays Mia, a would-be actress in Los Angeles who rushes to fruitless auditions between shifts at a coffee place on the Warner Bros. studio lot. Her star is crossed with Sebastian (Gosling), a hopeless jazz aficionado who earns his crust playing carols in piano bars, or, sometimes, the keytar. After a few chance meetings, their spiky back-and-forth (and literal tap-dancing) gives way to romance, solidified by a weightless dance across Griffith Observatory’s planetarium. Love does funny things to people, and gravity.

The hard part comes next, when two dreamers discover that childhood reveries and storybook romance may pull them towards L.A., but it won’t be enough to keep them there (or pay the bills).

Through it all, Mia and Sebastian serenade one another, or themselves, with original songs from composer Justin Hurwitz and lyricists Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. Most won’t get stuck in your memory, except for the recurring “City of Stars”, hummed mournfully multiple times by Gosling, and “Audition (The Fools Who Dream)”, which gives Stone a bona fide show-stopper (and, presumably, an Oscar). Be grateful we have new tunes to add to the grand cinema songbook. Welcome additions to the canon are few and far between. (Pour one out for Begin Again and God Help the Girl.)

Stone, whose previous musical forays have been entirely goofy (“Turn Up The Beef”; “I Broke My Arm”; “All I Do Is Win”), is especially excellent here, though Gosling has never been so endearing, and that is saying something. Their pipes don’t rival, say, Anne Hathaway or Hugh Jackman; nonetheless, it remains an absolute pleasure to watch them dance around and sing sweet nothings to one another.

There’s not much else to La La Land, but that’s only a problem if you go in seeking deeper profundity. It’s offering laughs, sumptuous set-decoration and swoon-worthy romance. In fact, if it wasn’t for La La Land’s wry sense of humour, you could see precisely how it would alienate, if not enrage, viewers.

The opening tempts fate with some cloying, Coke ad choreography on a stretch of L.A. freeway, to the cheery number “Another Day Of Sun”. I suppose it’s important to remember how these things we call advertising clichés were ripped off wholesale from the counter-culture and particularly the French New Wave and Italian art films. (Blame Don Draper.) La La Land’s simply a little late to the party.

Maybe more than a little late. You couldn’t contrive a feature less attuned to the current climate—despite its modern-day setting—than La La Land, though that may make it the ideal antidote to our year. It will take a while to wear down cynical viewers; perhaps right until its final scene (very, very mild spoilers ahead), recalling the ending of (the similarly pastel-coloured) Umbrellas of Cherbourg, or, for a reference from this century, the beginning of Up.

As we learn, La La Land is about compromise. In real life, a price must be paid for success. However, in the movies, you can have it all, and with the spirit of Singin’ in the Rain’s “Gotta Dance” fantasy, we see how Mia and Sebastian’s romance could have played out in the perfect world of celluloid. (This is where cinematographer Linus Sandgren, whose single-take dance sequences are already astonishing, gets to truly shine.)

As Fiona Apple once opined, “Nothing wrong when a song ends in the minor key.” Nothing at all.

4/5

In cinemas Boxing Day. Rated M for coarse language.

Photo: Summit