Review: La La Land

What exactly is La La Land? A classic Hollywood musical? A homage? A satire? Or a "love vs career" story? In the end, Damien 'Whiplash' Chazelle's film tries to have it four ways and creates an identity conflict that even the considerable charisma of its two leads cannot fully overcome.

Already, I've heard other critics wax lyrical about how extraordinary, magical and original La La Land is. It is none of those things.

Everything on show in the film has been done before, and done better - the fleet-footed, streamlined grace of The Artist or the edge of the haphazard yet admirable Hail Caesar is absent almost entirely, largely replaced by blunt symbolism, oppressive camerawork and a flashback vs. reality ending that echoes, of all things, Titanic.

I guess something had to be put in place to sway Academy votes in the right direction.
Consider the admittedly quite catchy opening number Another Day Of Sun, where we're guided into a song and dance on a stuck-in-traffic highway, a "technicolour world made out of music and machine", as the lyrics put it. It's nicely done, but are we meant to admire its self-knowing cleverness or simply get swept away by it? Is it sending up clichés or celebrating them?

Already one feels like a party pooper, watching everyone have a good time on the screen while not being entirely immersed in the cinema.
Cue the contrived, if kind of charming, meet cute between aspiring actress Mia (Emma Stone) and aspiring jazz pianist Sebastian (Ryan Gosling).

The former's working as a barista to make ends meet, the latter's playing Christmas songs on a piano to do the same. It's not spoiling anything at all to say that Mia and Sebastian become Shakespeare In Love interests to each other, inspirations both creatively and romantically. Would that the same could be said of the film to us.

Fortunately, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone rise above the material to earn Sebastian and Mia their chemistry and effectively carry La La Land. Gosling's task is problematic, thankless even; often, he is merely a conscience, a voice of maturity for Mia, pumping whatever soul he can into a cipher.

The always-good Stone (who managed to inject light and life into the equally disappointing and overrated Birdman) is more at ease, successfully battling against a surfeit of clunky visuals, tear-stained close ups and sweeping camera moves to fire heart and humanity into her role.

Yet for all the near-magical moments that Gosling and Stone enjoy, like a Fred and Ginger dance, two almost kisses and a sequence where they float into the air in a planetarium, there's lines like, "I want to be on the ropes. I'm letting life hit me until it gets tired." Seriously? And what's with the wannabe jazz pianist playing Take On Me at a party while longing for something better, with the "I've got to run away" lyric of Tainted Love soon hammering the point home? If you're going to be metaphorical, do it gracefully.

Again, I point to The Artist, which conveyed La La Land's strongest message of adapting to change without surrendering one's identity much better than Damien Chazelle has here.
La La Land is like a song and dance that knows what notes it wants to hit and what moves it wants to make but doesn't hear the music.

When we hear a casting director tell Mia that she will be auditioning for a film that will be built not around script but character, it's hard not to sigh with frustration and wish that the writer and director had listened to his own advice at that very moment. In short: if only Chazelle had followed his leads more than he followed his lead.

Simon Fallaha

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