La La Land
Go! Cinema at its most sparkly.
Fulflling fantasies in Hollywood's Hills.
With a record seven Golden Globes, La La Land has finally arrived in the UK in a tsunami of success; sweeping onto the busy beach of award season drenched in five star reviews and adjectives of acclaim. For 31-year-old writer/director Damien Chazelle, it is his third of a music-driven “jazz trio” that began in 2011 with cute, black and white indie Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench and followed by the mainstream, magnificent Whiplash two years later. Now, people everywhere are going ga-ga for La La. Should you?
Budding actress Mia (Emma Stone) and obsessive jazz pianist Seb (Ryan Gosling) cross paths in LA, each trying to fulfil their parallel dreams of acheiving artistic success and Hollywood infamy. As their romance develops, the competing tension between their passions, pursuits and paychecks threatens to pull them apart. Their story is told with a reminiscence of Hollywood’s technicolor era; interspersed with singing and dancing that spins the tale with dream-like moments that waft beyond the boundaries of physics and fiction and into the depths of Chazelle’s romantic imagination. It’s an expressive endeavour about the endeavour of expression.
Budding actress Mia (Emma Stone) and obsessive jazz pianist Seb (Ryan Gosling) cross paths in LA, each trying to fulfil their parallel dreams of acheiving artistic success and Hollywood infamy. As their romance develops, the competing tension between their passions, pursuits and paychecks threatens to pull them apart. Their story is told with a reminiscence of Hollywood’s technicolor era; interspersed with singing and dancing that spins the tale with dream-like moments that waft beyond the boundaries of physics and fiction and into the depths of Chazelle’s romantic imagination. It’s an expressive endeavour about the endeavour of expression.
It’s hugely impressive; always falling on the right side of magical, romantic and nostalgic versus kitsch, melodramatic and passé. It easily invites complimentary comparisons with American cinema’s great musicals: Singin’ in the Rain, My Fair Lady, Grease, Chicago. From a joyous opening sequence that transforms a flyover traffic jam into a concrete stage for colourful choreography, it would take the coldest of souls not to thaw and embrace La La Land. The score is a feast of toe-tapping tunes, allied with top, actual toe-tapping and excellent acting from the charisma-ultra combo of Gosling and Stone. Gosling (who learnt to play the piano in preparation for La La Land and played all of the piano scenes himself), continues to be infuriatingly talented, adding Gene Kelly-ing to his already prolific James Deansiness. Equally, Emma Stone gives a characteristically honest and heartfelt performance; her emotive eyes gleaming like enormous snow globes, simultaneously inspiring wonder and delight. Between them, the actors create a true sense of romance in a rare cinematic relationship burdened by the pursuit of excellence rather than promiscuity. Regardless of all the prancing and warbling, the film is nothing without the relationship between its two central figures
And yet, in spite of all that, it is hard to be as effusive about La La Land as its acclaim would ask. Largely, because it is a film that reinforces Hollywood’s increasingly insatiable love affair with itself and so can’t help but being just a little...masturbatory. Two beautiful, young, talented, ambitious, white, successful, wealthy performers play equivalent versions of themselves in a movie about being beautiful, young, talented, ambitious, white and probably, eventually wealthy and successful. While it follows similar themes to those explored by Chazelle in Whiplash, of sacrifice and endurance in the quest for creative excellence, it lacks the confrontational force of its predecessor. Replacing blood and sweat with step-ball-changes and vocal runs makes it more accessible, but less profound. This doesn’t make it any less entertaining as a spectacle, but it certainly detracts from its overall weight. Having won in all of its major awards in the “Comedy or Musical” categories at the Golden Globes (rather than the more heavyweight “Drama” categories), its lightness should leave it without anywhere near as many Oscars. But award ceremonies are all about self-congratulating people in Hollywood, which gives a self-congratulatory movie about Hollywood people something of an advantage…
Nonetheless – politics aside – It is a warm and affectionate movie that gleefully celebrates the Hollywood dream (without, thankfully, being Glee). You may not leave the cinema with a deeper understanding of life, but you will be humming its award winning song “City of Stars”, grinning wider than an English toad in a golden lift and telling your friends how “oh my god so amazing” Ryan Gosling is.
Nonetheless – politics aside – It is a warm and affectionate movie that gleefully celebrates the Hollywood dream (without, thankfully, being Glee). You may not leave the cinema with a deeper understanding of life, but you will be humming its award winning song “City of Stars”, grinning wider than an English toad in a golden lift and telling your friends how “oh my god so amazing” Ryan Gosling is.
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