Review

LA LA love it!

Damien Chazelle’s dazzling movie isn’t the same old song and dance

Damien Chazelle’s modern musical La La Land is “exhilarating, fearless, sweepingly moving” and likely to leave you “glad to be alive.” It also has Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone.
Damien Chazelle’s modern musical La La Land is “exhilarating, fearless, sweepingly moving” and likely to leave you “glad to be alive.” It also has Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone.

On a crowded L.A. freeway, cars are stopped in a traffic jam, and it's clear no one is going anywhere. People playing their radios pipe a dozen different musical styles into the opening soundtrack, and then, as if by magic, a car door suddenly swings open, a young woman steps out into song, and following her, more car doors open, more people pour out, until the entire section of highway explodes in synchronized song and dance, with skateboarders, BMXers, parkour enthusiasts, and from behind a raised truck back door, a calypso band joining in the festive fun. It's a crazy, madcap sort of scene, so audacious you have to smile, and it happens to be the opening sequence to La La Land, Damien Chazelle's full-blown modern musical masterpiece.

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A jazz pianist (Ryan Gosling) and an aspiring actress (Emma Stone) discover each other in Damien Chazelle’s audacious valentine to movie musicals La La Land.

This is not easy for me to write. I have disavowed the musical form my entire adult life, decried its forced cheer and insincere, melodramatic pathos. I wouldn't be caught dead at a Broadway musical, I assure you. But this film, my friends, left me -- and I should point out, many of my fellow critics at the Toronto International Film Fest -- in a little puddle on my seat. It's everything people have always claimed to me a musical is meant to be: exhilarating, fearless, sweepingly moving, and leaving you glad to be alive. Somehow the ridiculously talented Chazelle (whose last film, Whiplash was one of my favorites in 2014) has produced a film of stunning grace and emotional warmth, and in the process, like little Cindy Lou Who, has managed to unlock my previously frigid heart.

La La Land

91 Cast: Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Rosemarie DeWitt, J.K. Simmons, Callie Hernandez, Finn Wittrock, John Legend

Director: Damien Chazelle

Rating: PG-13, for some language

Running time: 2 hours, 8 minutes

Immediately after the freeway number, everyone clambers back into their cars, including Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a would-be jazz pianist fiddling with his tape deck, and in the Prius directly in front of him, Mia (Emma Stone), a fledgling actress rehearsing her lines en route to an audition. This isn't a meet cute: After blasting his horn, Seb speeds past her, and they share a mutually flipped bird at each other. But sometime later, Mia is walking home from a party and happens to hear a snippet of piano coming from inside a club, only to discover Seb playing a melancholy piece to a crowd of disinterested diners. This meeting goes scarcely better, but when she spots him again, now hilariously playing a keytar for an '80s party band, she enacts her revenge, and the two begin to actually hit it off.

You can certainly see where this is going: Two down-on-their-luck artists trying to make it in Hollywood, the most unforgiving city in the world, discover each other, enabling them to actively pursue their outrageous dreams sheltered in each other's arms. The standard musical narrative (I am told) would have it that they first hit a rough patch -- in this case because Seb joins a jazzy pop band and starts grinding away on tours, as Mia writes a one-woman show that few people ever attend -- and break up, only to reunite, in a reprise of their theme song, to show the world (I suppose) that open hearts and good harmonies invariably lead to fairy-tale happiness. I'm happy to report, however, that Chazelle is actually using the form to spin a different, far more bittersweet story, one whose ending might literally leave you gasping, if only for a few painful seconds.

Achieving this sort of potency utilizing a form of cinema consigned to nostalgic retrospectives and late-night TV binges, you might assume the film is acerbic, mocking, self-aware of its own ridiculousness, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Instead, it's a loving paean to the form -- old Hollywood is called back repeatedly, as are shout-outs to everything from Rebel Without a Cause to Casablanca -- that only enhances the narrative Chazelle has chosen to share. It's still filled with intelligence, humor and wit, it gently mocks Hollywood phoniness while embracing its legendary past, and it puts its two stars to work front and center for the world to see. There are no body doubles or fancy editing to save the actors from the dance scenes, nor are there overdubs to mask their voices. The film takes pains to give us an authentic experience even from within the single most far-fetched cinematic form ever created.

Some bitter purists have already decried it for its stars' musical limitations (though to my unpracticed ear, both Gosling and Stone are perfectly fine), but in the same way I'd much rather hear a sloppy-but-emotive Neil Young guitar solo over anything performed by guitar wunderkind Yngwie Malmsteen, with his cold, lifeless precision, so too am I drawn by the imperfections of Mia and Seb's renditions. They ­aren't flawless by any stretch, but they are all the more human for it. If what I held against musicals previously was the disingenuousness in their professional execution of incredibly unpredictable human emotions, this film proves the opposite is also true: Musicals can dig deep into our psyche precisely because words alone can't get at the core of our emotional selves. Chazelle's film, with its unfettered embrace of the imperfect, creates nothing less than a vital symphony of the human condition.

MovieStyle on 12/23/2016

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