Here’s to the ones who dream,
Foolish as they may seem;
Here’s to the hearts that ache
Here’s to the mess we make.
It’s not Dylan (Bob or Thomas), but these lyrics - sung by Emma Stone’s character in La
La Land, pretty much sum up the theme of this exuberant homage to movie
musicals - a critical darling and box office hit. The story is a romance
between two beautiful, young dreamers: Mia (Stone), in the timeless Hollywood
tradition, has come to L.A. with aspirations to be a movie star but struggles to get noticed; while Sebastian {“Seb”](Ryan Gosling) is a pianist and jazz
purist who bemoans the dilution of his favorite music into MOR crap, and who
dreams of opening a jazz nightclub for the faithful. They meet cute with a
lovely, nostalgically flirty song and dance. So long as both are unsuccessfully
striving, their love affair blooms – their hopes and fantasies sweet and
mutually sustaining. As success beckons, however, sacrifices must be made,
threatening the bubble of their romance. It’s an old story.
Old stories can be great stories, though, if handled well
and told with style and originality. And La La Land certainly has proven
to be a crowd pleaser. As of mid-January 2017, five weeks after its initial
very limited release and just three weeks into its wide release run, the
picture has grossed aver $130 million, quadruple its production costs, and it’s
still rolling. A successful awards season may double those numbers. (Take that
Disney and Marvel!) And people are talking about it. More people have asked me
my opinion of La La Land than any other movie this season.
Some of this is the result of tremendous media hype. I mean,
critics have gone nuts over this picture. It’s got a Metascore of 93 and an
IMDB rating of 8.8, both quite high. It just won seven Golden Globes, including
Best Director, Best Screenplay, and in the “musical or comedy” category, Best
Picture, Best Actor and Best Actress! (The GGs ought to be taken with a a grain
or two of smelling salts: voting is exclusively by members of the Hollywood
Foreign Press Association, i.e. 85 to 90 foreign journalists working in L.A. Sometimes their nominees and winners do match
the Oscars, but frequently they differ. Ricky Gervais, who has hosted the GGs
several times got off the best line
comparing the two: “ The Golden Globes are to the Oscars what Kim Kardashian is
to Kate Middletion; bit louder, bit trashier, bit drunker, and more easily
bought.” Perhaps they are also more readily seduced by a big, splashy retro-Hollywood
musical?
La La Land was conceived, written and directed by
Damien Chazelle, whose last such project was Whiplash in 2014, which wound
up getting five Oscar nominations (including Best Picture and Best Adapted
screenplay), and won three, among them the Best Supporting Actor award to JK
Simmons (for his performance as a bullying music teacher). In between, Chazelle
wrote the screenplay for 10 Cloverfield Lane, the hit horror-drama released
in early 2016. I liked Whiplash a lot, which added to my expectations for La
La Land. Chazelle just turned 32 this week! A bit of a
wunderkind, this fellow.
Leaving aside commercial success, how do we assess this
film? Is it really that good? Well, no and yes. Here’s my story:
Believing the pre-release hype about how La La Land
was reinventing the Hollywood musical, taking the best from the past, updating
and re-invigorating it, I was looking forward to this movie months before its
release. Comparisons were made to the Fred Astaire/ Ginger Rogers musicals of
the 1930s and to Robert Donen and Gene Kelly’s Singin’ In The Rain (1952). I also read
that La La Land’s look and feel most closely resembled the classic Jacque
Demy musicals of the mid-1960s. I’d never been a huge devotee of movie musicals.
Those I’d seen, mostly late fifties/early sixties adaptations of Broadway hits
- the likes of My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music, and such; or
Disney fare like Mary Poppins – these always seemed kind of hokey to me..
Having never seen the Demy films, I boned up. Watching Umbrellas
of Cherbourg (1964) and Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) was a
revelation. Both have been restored for transfer to digital, and both are visually
dazzling and gorgeous. The production design (Bernard Evein), art direction and
photography combine for an evocatively beautiful pastel look in Umbrellas and an effervescent, cotton
candy presentation in Young Girls: beautiful
young Catherine Deneuve, who stars in both movies, is fresh and enchanting; and
the music by Michael Legrand is terrific. I sat
there smiling like an idiot for the first half hour of Umbrellas. That film is the more romantic of the two and has a more
touching story; while Young Girls is
lighter, frothy and fun. In short, I adored those movies.
I also reminded myself of how Fred and Ginger did it, checking
out Swing Time (1936), one of nine pictures the duo made for RKO between
1933 and 1939. Their dancing was truly incredible
and sublime, even eighty years later. Although
the story is insipid and the romance not very credible – largely due to Astaire
being more in love with his technique than with his partner - the remarkable
dance numbers were reason enough to watch.
Armed with these experiences and high expectations, I went
to see La La Land on its Bay Area opening night … and frankly, I was disappointed. It wasn’t bad, mind you; but it just was not as good as the Demy films with which I had just fallen in love, and which Chazelle was trying so hard to honor and emulate. WhereUmbrellas of Cherbourg and Young Girls
of Rochefort seemed effortless in their incorporation of music, dance and
romance, La La Land broke out in a sweat trying to do the same. Still, I
was entertained. And given its high praise from so many others, after a couple
of weeks I decided to see it again.
I liked it much better the second time. One reason, I think
was that I no longer had the same super-high expectations the second time
around. And there’s a lot to like in La La Land.
Let’s start with the opening scene, a big, splashy singin’
and dancin’ production that’s set, of all places, in a traffic jam on a freeway overpass in L.A. The song is the bouncy, latin-infused anthem Another Day of Sun – sung by and about all
the beautiful, young hopefuls, streaming into the City of Angels looking for
stardom of one sort or another. It’s a good song and exuberant musical number,
all the more impressive for being filmed in one brilliant, sweeping, zooming shot
over three and a half exhilarating minutes. This is soon followed by another striking
song and dance number, albeit on a smaller scale, in which pretty Mia and her three
pretty roommates, in choreographed red, blue, gold and green dresses, head out
to a party hoping to be ‘discovered’ by Someone
In The Crowd. In fact, just about all of the songs featured in La La Land
are quite fine, including a touching and scorching Audition (The Fools Who Dream), sung by Emma Stone. Oddly, the one
exception is a little item intended to be the centerpiece of the movie: a piano
tune composed by Sebastian (the jazz purist who detests MOR music) called Mia and Sebastian’s Theme, which is
pleasant enough but not the least bit jazzy and, in fact, very MOR.
Then there are the very attractive lead actors, handsome
hunky Gosling to melt the hearts of lady viewers and Stone, with her big, wide,
liquid eyes, to titillate the guys (or vice-versa, depending on your sexual
preference). Stone gives the more evocative performance, capped by her
rendition of Audition, but both are appealing,
solid, and believable ion their roles. Neither is an accomplished dancer, but
they trained well enough to pull off a bit of the old soft shoe, and Chazelle
and his team did a nice job designing the dance sequences to cover up for their
limitations. And although Ryan and Emma’s
steps can’t hold a candle to Fred and Ginger, their romantic chemistry is far
more credible. Neither is a great singer, but each can hold a
tune, and their untrained voices actually add charm and nuance to the songs.
The theme of Hollywood dreams plays well. The art direction
revels in its artiface - intoxicatingly
colorful at times, nightclub moody at others, always encouraging us to fall
into the fantasy. The story moves along
nicely and its bittersweet ending is greatly enhanced by a cool segue into Mia’s
mind, as she meditates on what might have been.
My advice: ignore the hype, see the movie.
And if you’ve never seen Umbrellas of Cherbourg or Young
Girls of Rochefort - or haven’t viewed them in years, seek them out, watch
on the best screen available, turn up the volume. But only after you’ve enjoyed La La Land.
Grade: A-
The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) is available streaming on FilmStruck and on DVD from Netflix.
Five star review
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