La La Land

Nothing travel-y here; I'm in Bristol visiting friends, with another update on Skye (as well as my travels here and in Glasgow) due in the next few days. But I've got some spare thoughts kicking around about La La Land, which I saw yesterday with my friend Kate, and what's a blog for if not to map out some still-formulating ideas? After the jump, uninformed pontificating on movies rather than places!



To be brief, I loved some parts of this movie a lot. To lead with the biggest: I am so glad director Damien Chazelle, crafting an homage to movie musicals of the fifties and (probably more so) sixties, was mindful of how much framing and long shots contributed to the impact of musical numbers in those productions. Some of it is cheated (a lot of long takes panning up and down to matching shots) but if nothing else, letting the camera focus on full bodies in frame makes a huge difference in the post-Chicago world of frenetic cutting. Particularly for chorus numbers (that opening song!) this is effective, and I really hope people like Chazelle keep expanding the horizons of movie musicals. (My own personal vendetta against Rob Marshall's approach is best set aside FOR NOW, but I'd like to see more directors playing in this sandbox.)

Similarly, Chazelle and Ryan Gosling do great work matching Gosling's piano playing to the soundtrack, which is essential for the plot but rarely done as well as it is here. It's not especially showy, but a crucial detail and almost certainly why Gosling just won a Golden Globe for the performance. On the flip side... I didn't quite love Gosling in this role. It's written as a kind of Gene Kelly-esque "artist with sharp edges" figure, especially in the first two acts, and while Gosling can be brilliant and very funny, his strengths run to shaggy internalism rather than the kind of arch, pointed, precise work that I think the role called for. Not a bad performance by any means, but lacking that finesse that would have kicked the film into a higher gear.

A small note that doesn't fit elsewhere in this thumbnail sketch: the movie's vision of contemporary jazz/pop skews a bit toward the cartoonish. Gosling's performance with John Legend's band would have been well-painted without the dancers telegraphing "this is inauthentic," as if Stop Making Sense didn't show us that you can be a musical visionary and also employ dancers as part of your live show... but on the other hand, Legend is given one of the film's sharper and smarter critiques of Gosling's character, calling him out for insisting on an "authentic" style of jazz that flies in the face of the form's pioneering, innovative spirit. It's a complicating detail that I like a lot, and Legend's performance in the role is quite winning.

More broadly, while I come very close to loving what the film does in its last act, and what it suggests about how these characters have grown and matured and learned from the events of the film, I'm not entirely sure that I get what the (spoiler alert I guess?) dream ballet at the finale is meant to signify, and thus what the film is ultimately suggesting about how relationships operate. In some ways the film admirably resists totally neat musical-theatre grand-gesture happy-ending logic, but the dream ballet... well, without getting into the weeds of the plot, it felt to me like it cut against what the film was rather excitingly suggesting. Relationships: movies about them are sometimes able to suggest their complicated and bittersweet nature!

Finally, and perhaps the thing that stuck in my brain the hardest, making it the trickiest thing to get past... the film opens with a tour-de-force chorus number in one supposed take, with a cast that closely reflects the ethnic mix of Los Angeles (and, as Kate observed, a diversity of body types as well). In a later scene, Gosling's character fervently sells Emma Stone's character on the beauty of jazz as a form that grew out of cultural difference as a way to communicate. And in those two moments are the seeds, I think, of a more-interesting and more-complex movie, making it all the more disappointing that ultimately we've been asked instead to care about whether two white people will be professionally and romantically successful. (To be clear, I don't think I wish the movie had become a complex study of racial dynamics in Hollywood, because that is clearly not at all what it wants to be, but it is somewhat a shame that neither of its lead roles went to performers of color, or that racial diversity didn't emerge from the background - particularly in Gosling's jazz club environs - and into the throughline of the movie itself.) In a world in which Crazy Ex Girlfriend exists (the best show you're not watching, get on it) that's a bit disappointing - you don't need diversity to make A Statement, as CXGF has shown, you can just... reflect the world in which we live.

So, those are my complicating factors in a movie that I liked quite a bit, and whose broad-strokes template (movies that assume audiences understand how song works in musicals and don't need justifications; movies that shoot their songs as performance pieces rather than music videos) I hope is picked up by films to come. Now let's all go take naps, work on dissertation chapters, and fly to Barcelona!