La La Land a sweet and sad musical throwback

Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in La La Land. Image courtesy Lionsgate.

Writer/director Damien Chazelle has created something marvelous with La La Land. He's taken the best assets of the traditional musicals – the fantastic dreaminess of the dance sequences, the perfect banter that brought relationships to life – and meshed them with modern sensibilities to create a loving homage without devolving into a cheap rehash. It's a film easy to fall in love with and retains some intellectual challenge and consideration about the complicated nature of relationships and the complications of dreams.

There is a logic in using the bones of the old studio musical and inserting bits of modernity to keep it in touch with a younger audience. The classic boy meets girl story, in this case an aspiring actress who grew up on Bogart and the Hepburns (Emma Stone's Mia) and hopeful jazz pianist in love with Felonious Monk (Ryan Gosling's Sebastian) who meet and fall into a relationship, is difficult to botch wholesale as long as the actors have some spark between them. Fortunately, Stone and Gosling are charming as hell individually and share an incredible rapport that makes their flirting seem realistic and sweet amid the more fantastic elements. They sync together almost perfectly, with a perfect charm and a surprising accessibility for two incredibly good looking people. They just sort of glide together, a trait shared with much of La La Land as a whole, from the plotting and pacing to the musical sequences that ease naturally into the story with minimal to no disruption. The tricky thing with musicals is avoiding cramming songs in for the sake of having them in there, wasting valuable minutes on a point that leads nowhere, an issue Chazelle avoids by limiting the number of musical interludes and staggering them to reflect the moment in Mia's and Sebastian's relationship. The songs are more plentiful and more cheerful in the early stages of the relationship and both diminish and darken as the relationship evolves and the seasons change.

Dreams are the life force for La La Land. The film is an ode to the people who dreamed of making it big, the ones who scratched and clawed their way to success despite one rejection after another and somehow found a way to come out on top. The title itself is a link to a romantic hint at the lives Mia and Sebastian pursue, ones in which the greatest hopes and desires are filled with a little luck and a lot of persistence to make things work. Anything can happen in La La Land; traffic jams can become musical numbers, characters can dance among the stars at a planetarium, people will sing along to the songs you start on a whim. Yet there's an ironic twist to the idea of La La Land akin to Faulkner's short story Golden Land. The titles present a whimsical, playful perception of life in Los Angeles, but lurking just beneath the surface is a little heartbreak and disappointment. La La Land dives in from the get go, its opening song both a revelry of pursuing a life of dreams and a comment on how fleeting those dreams can be; the sun always shines even after the hopefuls pack their bags and abandon the pursuit. The film continues with that concept throughout, showing the need to have large aspirations as a part of the human condition and the ramifications those pursuits can have. Success sometimes means abandoning love when the two conflict and the love isn't strong enough to overcome.

Such dreams are a little wistful by their nature, as is the nostalgia felt for hopes that never panned out and memories that are never quite as perfect as they seem. La La Land loads up on the latter, featuring a pair of characters too young to have lived the pasts they wrap themselves in but still wanting to be part of it. They live for something they can't have, and Chazelle uses their longing as the reason the two would connect in the first place and the root of their eventual troubles. The film uses nostalgia as a selling point and turns it around on the audience, a choice that is a little cruel given how sweet everything appears but more honest than letting the fantasy run amok. Dreams are vital in La La Land, but even in a movie that loves improbable aspiration the sweetest fantasy can’t overcome reality.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 128 minutes

Genre: Musical

Ask Away

Target audience: People missing an old fashioned musical.

Take the whole family?: The F-bomb is dropped once, but the overall content isn't overly problematic for kids. Ages 10 and up is fine.

Theater or Netflix?: It'd make for a great date night film.

How's the soundtrack?: Legitimately great and enjoyable. There's a strong mix of classic musical score, a bit of John Legend influence, and more jazz appropriate tunes, and the two work splendidly together. Plus it is catchy as all heck; I kept whistling one of the main tracks, City of Stars, while walking to the train after the movie.

Watch this as well?: This one is rather similar to the French film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which stars a very young Catherine Deneuve. While the films differ a bit in presentation – any dialogue in Umbrellas of Cherbourg is sung – both deal with the fleeting nature of love and how life moves on even after passion fades. A more familiar friendly pick is one I recommend frequently, Enchanted, which is carried in large part by Amy Adams' terrific performance.