"La La Land" - Film Review
Los Angeles is an easy city to deeply love and deeply hate, and it is impossible to describe that to someone who has never lived there. The closest a non-resident can come to gaining an understanding of that sensation is by watching Damien Chazelle’s La La Land. On the one hand, there are the warm, sun-kissed beaches, the millionaires, and the secluded canyons of the San Gabriel mountains. It’s the promised land of golden dreams for actors, musicians, and writers, where success is always right around the corner. On the other hand, you’ll find smog, traffic, and abject failure. Los Angeles, with all its promises, is a pendulum that swings widely.
Mia Dolan (Emma Stone) has been living in Los Angeles for quite a few years and she still hasn’t gotten her big acting break. She works at the coffee shop on the Warner Bros. lot and goes to audition after audition, all to no avail. Sebastian Wilder (Ryan Gosling) is a jazz pianist who wants nothing more than for people to fall in love with jazz again. His dream is to open his own jazz nightclub, but instead, as the movie opens, he’s playing mindless Christmas carols in a classic steakhouse in Burbank. This is where Mia and Sebastian meet for the first time, and where their love story begins.
When a film tries to bring a sense of old Hollywood glamour to the twenty-first century, it is so easy to get swept up in the romance of it all. It’s impossible not to fall in love with the way Mia and Sebastian dance through the top of the city at Griffith Observatory. The chemistry between Stone and Gosling is electric and excuses their just-passable dancing and singing skills. An attempt is made to harken back to the days of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, but the dancing never quite reaches that caliber. Still, it’s hard to fault Stone and Gosling when they are so completely present in every moment. Especially in the single-take “A Lovely Night” that could only be filmed during the magical light of the twilight hour.
Lionsgate
There is a grandness to La La Land. It comes from the immensity of the dreams that Mia and Sebastian have and the lengths they will go to as they follow them. And it comes from the city itself. Mia and Sebastian traipse around to different parts of “classic” Los Angeles, taking the viewer along with them to Angels Flight downtown, Watts Tower, Chateau Marmot, Griffith Park, and more. Something about the history of these places and the art they’ve been featured in makes this story feel timeless. In the same way that Mia takes Sebastian around the Warner Bros. lot and points to the window that was used in filming Casablanca, there is probably someone on that same lot right now pointing to the coffee shop that was featured in La La Land. This film has cemented itself among the Hollywood greats that inspired it.
La La Land is a movie about love. The love Mia and Seabastian have for their crafts. The love for the people who pack up their lives and move to Los Angeles to follow their dreams. The love of movies. The love of music. A love of the terrible, beautiful city of Los Angeles. This film is a celebration of “the fools who dream.” The world would be a much darker place without those fools.
The film also pays respect to relationships that don’t last. The people who come into our lives for short periods of time, push us along on our paths, and then move on. That love, though, often lasts much longer than the relationships. While they might not be right for the long term, some people come to share our lives, and our dreams, at just the right moment.
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