La La Land
Director: Damien Chazelle
Running Time: 128 minutes
The musical, once one of the central mainstays of classic Hollywood, hasn’t so much been killed off by modernity as much as guillotined by it. Barring the occasional Broadway adaptation (The ‘Phantom Of The Opera’ take your bow! Or rather, don’t) the Hollywood musical is a museum piece that seems as prehistoric as anything in the Natural History Museum to modern eyes. This is why ‘La La Land’, which certainly seems to be a relatively frothy bit of cinema on the surface, is in some ways quite a bold film. Bringing Westerns back as more violent, brutal genre pieces is one thing, but asking audiences to forget decades worth of cynicism is quite another. As a result La La Land approaches its romantic central story with a certain degree of ironic remove, but make no bones about it: ‘La La Land’ is a big-hearted traditional love story disguised in Millennial Sarcasm and is likely to make audience adverse to that kind of nonsense roll their eyes hard enough to whirl them out of their heads.
Luckily the two leads Mia and Sebastian are played by the eminently likeable Emma Stone and, the admittedly rather more erratically charismatic Ryan Gosling, both of whom manage to be charming enough to keep ‘La La Land’ on an even keel. No small feat considering that in less capable hands the film has the potential to put the Hindenburg to shame. After a chance encounter Mia and Sebastian’s romance begins in a time-honoured Hollywood tradition: Naked dislike. In an act of cosmic matchmaking, Mia keeps running into the struggling jazz pianist Sebastian, (Gosling manages to tightrope his cranky charm just on the right side of funny instead of infuriating) Frustrated by the decline of jazz in the face of commercial reality (“I guess the joke’s on…..history” he complains about a famed jazz haunt that has rebranded as a ‘tapas and tango’ bar) and hung on the legends whose careers he covets, Sebastian is so stubbornly committed to “real” jazz that he can’t hold down a job playing standards at a swanky restaurant; he’s a cousin to both the maniacally driven drummer of Whiplash and Oscar Isaac’s hopelessly principled Llewyn Davis. But there’s a glimmer of something more beneath his cynicism, and Mia and Sebastian are drawn to each others’ respective passion. La La Land traces their salty-then-sweet courtship by season, watching as it evolves from mutual dislike to flirtatious antagonism to head-over-heels romance. Hanging on the horizon though is the fear that the pairs parallel dreams and frustrations will shatter the fledgling couple
Director Damien Chazelle’s first film was the crackling, tension-fuelled ‘Whiplash’ and the dynamic visual style (and jazz obsession) helps testify that his first feature was not a fluke. With ‘La La Land’ Chazelle took ‘Whiplash’s’ theme of unfairly measuring yourself against the greats of the past and expanded it to fill the picture’s entire universe. The setting might be 2017 but the characters and even the city itself are striving to recreate some idealised version of history, that might not even have existed the way they imagine it. La La Land is something of a marmite proposition, it’s froth will be offputting to some and it’s refusal to go all in on its musical heritage (the middle third of the film is effectively song free) and only one genuine showstopper of a song is in danger of alienating musical obsessives. La La Land is a fun, bittersweet ride that ultimately is probably badly served by the hype swirling around it. If you can manage to forget every word in this review and go in with no expectations than so much the better.
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