Sometimes you walk into a film that just feels like it was designed exclusively for you. Watching Damien Chazelle's exuberant, melancholy-tinged La La Land, it felt as though someone had made a film specifically designed for me.
First, I'm a sucker for an unapologetic, old-school musical, in which bickering couples fall in love to tuneful songs and dance and "moon" rhymes with "June." La La Land has this in spades, delighting me with the kind of musical in which individuals tap towards each other and burst in song without reluctance or embarrassment. However, it's also about the appealing allure of the past. It features nods to classic old-fashioned musicals such as Singin' in the Rain, An American in Paris, and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but the film is plastered with background images of iconic film stars, sending its appealing leads to a showing of Rebel without a Cause. Even the film's title is a reference to an old-fashioned nickname for Los Angeles.
It's rare for a film to both cling to the past and look towards the future, but La La Land manages to make doing both seem effortless. Chazelle's last film, Whiplash, was also about the cost of striving for artistic perfection. It too crackled with life and suspense, portraying drum solos like boxing matches (complete with bloody hands). La La Land has the same vivacious pulse, but it also has a winsomeness firmly rooted in a love of Fred Astaire & Rogers.
The film opens with a Los Angeles traffic jam, the soundtrack comprised of the disharmony of honking horns, running engines, and screeching brakes. From that dissonance comes a young girl exiting her car and singing of the life she left behind to seek fame in L.A. Eventually, the entire cast has joined the song, leaping out of their cars, singing and dancing, rainbow colors twirling. As soon as the song fades, the spell breaks and the traffic jam seamlessly resumes, as if that song and dance we just witnessed never happened.
Within that traffic jam are Mia (Emma Stone), a struggling actress and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a struggling pianist who wants to open a jazz club. Of course the two of them meet and connect through tap dancing and fall in love. That goes without saying. The central story and conflict at La La Land 's core is hardly uncharted territory, but isn't that always the case with musical comedies? After all, how many romances examine the difficulty of balancing career with love? The familiarity of the setup doesn't really matter, though. The film's about the feeling so strong simple spoken words cannot do them justice. Some emotions are just meant to be sung, and the score with music by Justin Hurwitz and lyrics Justin Paul and Benj Pasek reinforce the film's blend of the classic and the modern. The score sounds like Berlin and The Gershwins, but the lyrics crackle with modern wit and heartbreak.
La La Land is a kaleidoscopic array of technicolor glory, with colors that practically jete off of the screen. The camera lingers and twirls around the action, both echoing the lingering shots of the past and reveling in the film's blend of classic imagery with modern aesthetic. Stone and Gosling (previously seen together practicing the Dirty Dancing lift in Crazy, Stupid Love) practically exude charisma through their pores. They may not be the most flawless of singers or dancers, but they are stellar actors. They can sell the emotions even when their vocal range is limited or their choreography is a bit stiff. Stone, with her Kewpie doll eyes and enigmatic smile, is especially winning. She nails the film's fast-paced, screwball, romantic dialogue and conveys her character's later heartbreak with ease.
La La Land is a film about the desire to live in the past and the pangs that occur when modern times threaten to puncture romantic illusions. It's beautiful and romantic and heartbreaking. It features winning leads performances, a strong score, and a writer/ director whose love of both the classic and modern cinema. So, I'm going to take my critic's decoder ring off for a second, and just be honest. I love this film. I love its flowy, romantic style, its jazz meets Great American Songbook score, the gorgeous cinematography, the appealing leads. This film just ticked every one of my boxes. It just made me happy, and sometimes that's just what you need a film to do.
