La La Land: A Review

LA LA LAND

I find that every year, there is one film that becomes beloved, perhaps excessively, by critics, a love that may not be warranted.  This year, that film appears to be La La Land, an attempt to recapture the feel of an old-style Hollywood musical.  It certainly isn't a bad film, having many positives to it.  However, all I thought throughout La La Land is a feature that tries too hard to be that throwback without bringing anything actually new to the genre.

Aspiring actress Mia (Emma Stone) works as a barista at a coffee shop at a studio (given she mentions in the film that she's across the street where a scene in Casablanca was made, it should be Warner Brothers, odd given La La Land was made by 20th Century Fox, but there you go).  The film is split between her story and that of Sebastian (avant-garde actor Ryan Gosling), a jazz pianist who is so pure about his beloved jazz that he bristles at the idea of playing Christmas tunes to dining patrons during the holiday season.

Split between Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter...five years later, we see their story played out.  Mia and Sebastian technically first see each other in traffic, where Sebastian honks at Mia to move, she busy studying her script, and she responds by flipping him the bird.  They run into each other again at the restaurant where Sebastian is tortured with Jingle Bells to an uncaring world, the music drawing her in and he angrily pushing her away.  The third time, and beginning of their relationship, is when she goes to another Hollywood party for lower-run members of the industry, and Mia delights in Sebastian's misery (him having to play in an 80s cover band, nonplussed he had to play A Flock of Seagull's I Ran at her request).

Despite their own protests, a romance begins between them.  Mia dumps her old boyfriend to join Sebastian at a screening of Rebel Without a Cause, and soon they are in love.  Sebastian insists she fall in line...I mean, in love, with his beloved traditional jazz and she gets the courage to create a one-woman play to showcase her writing and acting ability. 

However, cracks soon begin to crop up.  Sebastian has very reluctantly agreed to join The Messengers, a funk/jazz band headed by his frenemy Keith (John Legend), primarily as a way to raise money to open up his jazz club (which he knows should flop because no one in L.A. appreciates the genius of Hoagy Carmichael or the Gershwins, especially like he does).  Mia for her part, is discouraged by the constant rejections and fears her one-woman showcase will display she has no real talent, only ambitions.  The Messengers are a wild success, even if Sebastian dislikes the music he plays, and Mia's surprised that he is willing to go on long tours and recording sessions, apparently forgetting about his dreams.

Things come to a head on the night of her show.  Sebastian is surprised to learn that very night is the night of a photo shoot, thinking it was another night.  Obviously, he missed her show and gets there as she is leaving the sparsely-attended performance.  She decides she's had enough of Hollywood and leaves for her hometown of Boulder City, Nevada, opting to grow up.  They end their romance.

In an unexpected turn, Sebastian is contacted by a casting agent who happened to be at Mia's one-woman show and loved it.  The casting agent wants to cast her in a film, and help out with the script too.  Sebastian races to Boulder City to get a disbelieving/disheartened Mia to give it one more try, which she does, and where she is successful. 

Full circle, Mia, now a successful actress with a husband and small daughter, gets coffee at the same shop.  On their anniversary, she and her husband David (Tom Everett Scott) wander into Seb's, a jazz club where she sees Sebastian play/emcee.  We then turn to a fantasy sequence where we see Sebastian's idealization of how things might have been if he'd been receptive to Mia when they met at the restaurant, but of course, it was all a dream.

I note that many of my fellow reviewers are enraptured with La La Land, treating it as if it were the Second Coming.  I cannot partake in that ebullient praising.  Now, don't get me wrong: I didn't dislike it by any measure.  I just didn't think it was as lovely or charming as others (or the film itself) thought they were.

One reason for my coolness towards La La Land may be because I didn't buy the concept of this type of musical.  With the traditional musicals of the past (especially MGM), there was always an element of unreality to them.  They never, as far as I know, tried to be totally authentic in making their world be exactly like ours.  There was always a sense of fantasy, of vague unreality to them.  La La Land, however, attempts to be totally within our world.  I am not convinced making a musical within 'reality' really works.  Not impossible, but in this case, not completely sold on the concept.

I think another reason for my less-than-rapturous reception for La La Land is because of Avant-garde actor Gosling.  His Sebastian never came across as a 'fool who dreams'.  Instead, he came across as a total, obnoxious music snob, arrogant and disdainful of anyone's views that didn't mirror his own.  How else to explain his completely serious comment that "requesting I Ran from a serious musician" was torture. 

Moreover, I was not won over by his performance.  Avant-garde actor Gosling always seemed to force his performance into a faux-believability, as if he wanted us to think Sebastian was really just passionate about traditional jazz but didn't believe he was the character.  Avant-garde actor Gosling I think just spoke the lines without making them real.  His arrogance and snobbery were already bad enough, but Avant-garde actor Gosling never convinced me his Sebastian was sincere or passionate about the music.  He convinced me he was 'acting', not being.

I'm not going to beat up on John Legend's performance.  He's a fantastic musician but he looked slightly out-of-place when he wasn't performing.  Legend has few credits to his name so while he may want to branch out into acting, the efforts weren't that good.

Finally, La La Land on more than one occasion pushed the bounds of self-awareness, of noting 'oh, look at won wonderful and cute and whimsical we all are', particularly when Mia and Sebastian are at the planetarium and they start floating on air.  It seems strange given writer/director Damien Chazelle is trying, I figure, for a traditional, old-school musical film with a slightly modern touch.  We get that in the two big production numbers we have at the beginning (Another Day of Sun, which takes place in a traffic jam reminiscent of 8 1/2, and Someone in the Crowd, which is at a big Hollywood party).

Those big numbers die down to more intimate one-on-one moments between Mia and Sebastian.  Nothing wrong with that.  I, however, was getting slightly miffed at the constant shout-outs to film's past (Mia walking past a mural of Hollywood legends) and the slight contrivance of the story (is it only in film where someone discovers he has to be in two places at once?  Was Keith totally unaware of Sebastian's relationship with Mia, or when her debut was?  Did Sebastian never bother to tell Keith he had to leave a rehearsal/recording session at a particular night and time because his girlfriend was staging a one-woman show?).

Whatever flaws La La Land has are made up for by two things: Stone and score.  Emma Stone is winning and charming as Mia, and balances an extremely difficult thing for a performer to do: act out 'acting'.  As the actress playing an aspiring actress, Stone has to 'audition' more than once, so she has to make us believe she is 'performing' to get cast and make us believe she is 'herself' (in this case, Mia).  She does so remarkably well.  Unlike Avant-Garde actor Gosling, she looks perfectly comfortable doing a little song-and-dance.  Stone's performance is one of the highlights of the film.

The other is Justin Hurwitz's score and songs (written with Benj Pasek and Justin Paul).  While Audition (The Fools Who Dream) is getting more attention, I favor the softer, more melancholy City of Stars (a rare moment where Avant-Garde actor Gosling doesn't look completely ill at ease, even if I'm not convinced he is a singer, which I am when it comes to Stone).

La La Land at times is too self-aware that it's 'whimsical' (making "Fall" both the season and when their romance 'falls' a bit too on the nose), and Avant-Garde actor Ryan Gosling didn't make me believe he was doing anything other than Acting With a Capital A with a character I neither believed or cared for.  However, with Emma Stone's nearly-effortless performance, some wonderful songs, and enough whimsy to make palatable, La La Land is a nice ode to musicals gone by.

DECISION: C+