Musicals are not made for everyone. You need to have a romantic soul and therefore be open to applauding the effort, no matter how strained and thready the end product might be.
Most film critics have praised Damien Chazelle’s “La La Land,” with most predicting it will be the dark horse to beat at the 89th Oscars®. I’m sure they are right. There are enough hopeful thematic scenes to hit the right cord with voters, and then there is the universal theme, la la-love.
“La La Land” is about love, with the central characters singing about all the things that make falling in love great or tragic, or tragically great.
What better device than music, song and dance to showcase the ebb and flow of romantic pursuits?
Thus Chazelle’s “La La Land” follows, giving the film a lot of dance and music but lyrics so weak, you feel pressed to call it a musical. Modern musical or not, a good musical must have some strong lyrics that hit and stay inside people’s heads and hearts. That’ what makes Broadway shows hits or misses.
In Chazelle’s vision, he focuses on choreography and simple music, maybe hoping that we miss the lack of power in the weak threaded lyrics of the many songs. The plus side is that it’s a very beautiful film to watch and it settles on subject matter, love and dreams, that touch us all.
It takes place in the city of dreams, aka, Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood, which is filled, naturally, with dreamers.
“La La Land” opens with such promise. Cars are stuck in the notoriously awful L.A. traffic when hopeful souls begin singing their hearts about one thing or another. The song is called
“Another Day of Sun,” and the upbeat song has young wannabe artists jumping out of the cars and dancing on the freeway. It’s an exciting beginning because under Chazelle’s direction, it’s one long, unbroken take.
It’s here that we meet our star-crossed lovers, pianist Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) and actress Mia (Emma Stone). Taking a cue from the best musicals, the lovers have a few false starts and poke fun at each other’s flaws in act one. But we know the drill. By act two, they will spark up and the magic of chemistry will get the two together. And “by God” they will sing and dance about every detail of their budding romance, because it’s a musical and that’s what musicals do.
The first major “getting to know each other” scene is a long walk together, at sunset, over the Hollywood Hills. They share shattered dreams and weary soul banter. Mia is tired of going on worthless auditions, citing one that really insulted her, in which, the producers don’t even look up from their phones.
Sebastian is a jazz purist and refuses to change, wanting to open his own club instead of selling out and playing greatest hits for tourists. So now we know more about the couple and all is revealed in snazzier choreographed dance numbers. Interesting point, and a reminder that even though this film is a musical, Stone and Gosling aren’t’t natural singers or dancers, but they both get high marks for effort.
On performance both Gosling and Stone so have that old fashioned “Hollywood” movie star quality, and they are both bona fide movie stars. But that only goes so far. At its heart, this story is about finding your artistic passion, and examining how easily it is to get derailed from your dream. These themes are a reminder that sometimes it takes another person—the right person— to push you back on course to find your passion again.
Perhaps “La La Land” also exists to remind us that movies can still have that magical touch, and encourages us to lose our cynical “glasses,” swapping them, if only for a moment, for rose-tinted spectacles instead. And although the lyrics of the musical “La La Land” are weak and forgettable, the feeling of why we all need to sing and dance every now and again is not lost. So, to that end, we should take a page from the characters’ book and just keep dancing.
“La La Land” is now playing. The film is a Lionsgate production, starring Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, John Legend and J.K. Simmons.