There are times when the emotions roiling deep within the human soul are too much for mere speech. Sometimes, you’ve just got to sing.
It can be as simple as humming along to the radio. Maybe even an intimate concert-for-one in the shower. All the way up to grand opera, with voices that rend planets from their orbit and summon some valkyries here and there. La La Land, the new film from Damien Chazelle (Whiplash), aims toward the middle of that continuum — for the shape of a ‘50s musical, more specifically, with the Cinemascope title card and everything. But its emotions are as big as any opera’s, with the expected star turns from Love, Charm and Regret, as well as stunning supporting work from Inchoate Jealousy, Realizing the Limits of Admiration From a Temporal Distance and an award-worthy turn from Conditional Subjunctivity, who hasn’t been this devastating since The Last Temptation of Christ.
It’s strange, the way that musicals are so often relegated to history. Because one of their defining characteristics is their immediacy — or rather, the sustained illusion of their immediacy. The opening number, a traffic jam turned testament to the countless dramas unfolding before us every time we take the time to observe the people right in front of us, is an ideal litmus test for any audience member who isn’t sure if they can take a musical that doesn’t couch its songs behind the veil of "fantasy" or "psychosis." It’s a candy-colored Los Angeles where everybody’s got a story and they sing about it, and if you can’t handle that or let yourself be transported for two hours and change, you are shit out of luck.
This is an LA of Prius jokes and forlorn pockets of genuine melancholy (often bathrooms), of the most exciting and immersive color philosophy (major hat-tip to Romano Albani, whose work on countless Italian shockers resonates in several of the key emotional scenes herein), as well as a recurrent dimming of lights that leaves a spotlight that was somehow there all along. It’s a movie about movies, but thankfully free of 99 percent of the industry chatter that can make metatexts such a slog sometimes.
Finding order out of the cacophony of ambient noise (think Dancer in the Dark’s “Scatterheart” and its factory noises) on a freeway backed up as far as the eye can see, Chazelle & Co. turn an egalitarian eye to the people who live each day for the chance to break through (oddly in fact breaking through, even if only for a moment, by being in this film), with focus and the story engine leaping from person to person even as many of the performers leap over concrete embankments or from one car to the next. It’s a relay race of narrative and melody, Linklater’s Slacker done as a parkour musical. And as all this is happening, she’s practicing for an audition. And he’s listening to, and compulsively rewinding, cassette tapes. That’s how we meet our stars — too caught up in their own worlds in their cars to see the magic around them.
She is Mia. Played by Emma Stone, Mia is an actress, charming and driven and tired of it all and just occasionally teetering on the edge. She’s Naomi Watts-in-Mulholland Drive good in this film, handling shifts in characterization with grace and pure, visceral feeling. She’s got a few dreams in her heart and a pair of flats in her purse because that’s just how life is. Stone has been having an incredible year (see also "Wells for Boys" and her dance track with The Lonely Island, “Turn Up the Beef”), and she steals your heart and breaks it, effortlessly, in this film. She gets several show-stopping scenes, but there’s one — involving "The Big Audition" (of course) — that is on a par with the Illeana Douglas/Kristen Vigard “God Give Me Strength” recording session scene in Allison Anders’ Grace of My Heart from 1996. Which is the highest praise a single-take-recording scene gets.
As Sebastian, a jazz purist even when bearing a keytar to pay the bills, Ryan Gosling is quite good. He’s got hair that loves to be backlit and a knack for knowing exactly when to bust out a blue suit, and he says things like “Why do you say ‘romantic’ like it’s a dirty word?” He’s a dreamer as well, still smarting from a bad business deal that took all his money, but all you really need to know about Gosling is this — he dances like he really gives a shit, and that makes such an unbelievable amount of difference. Also, and this is so rare in movies as to be extraordinary, he listens to her. Not just in certain situations, not just when she’s at wit’s end, or ecstatic, or raising her voice to make sure she’s heard. He listens to her, consistently. It’s a plot point, in fact.
You want to believe in this movie, in everything it offers, because it gets the impetuous glory of new love exactly right. The characters make that same unspoken bargain that we’ve all made in life, putting aside subtle warning signs because the charge of that magical new wow just keeps dumping endorphins into our systems. The first big number that the two share together lays the foundation for what they tear apart later on in the film; each is completely honest about who they are, but they’re feeling playful and also up for a challenge.
It isn’t until much later, over a tragic dinner lit in green tones and bruise-colored emotions, that they can actually speak honestly to one another; because sometimes, and sometimes for a long time, there are things you can only sing. In the long run of this film, you realize that no matter what happens, Mia and Sebastian have changed each other forever, because they’ve each helped expand and reshape the other’s taste in music. If you can make someone understand and love jazz, or help someone get past their hatred of drum machines and cross-pollinate their aesthetics, then you’ve made a major difference in somebody’s life. We allow entropy to claim our most dearly beloved just because of where we might be in the emotional processes of life. But you can never escape the sense memory of the person who introduced you to 4AD. Or the Quiet Storm. Or Maria McKee.
This movie does something, perfectly, to which I wrote in my notes “Jacques Demy’s Total Recall?”
Love is like that. It changes us and rearranges much of what we thought we had established completely and down pat. It’s a roller coaster ride of the guts, and that journey is what makes the memories indelible. La La Land is glorious, and beautiful, and wrenching. See it with someone you love, or would like to.
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