La La Land,
The Would-Be Big Musical--
A Tease and a Disappointment
Reviewed by
Eric Paul Nolte
(Spoiler alert…)
Yesterday we saw La La Land, Damien Chazelle’s film about the human conflict between passionate ambition and romantic love. The film aspires to be a big American musical set on the contemporary scene of Los Angeles.
What a tease! What a disappointment! So many big beautiful vistas, so much talent on screen, so much charm and beauty, so much good acting, so much imaginative writing and such a big portrayal of the cityscape of LA! And yet….
I believe the film aspires to be a big musical, in the tradition of Singing in the Rain, An American in Paris, and the countless movies featuring such luminaries as Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, and Debbie Reynolds. We even get some loose paraphrases and quotes from some of those works. But the film falls short of this goal, if this were its goal, despite such great attributes as having two protagonists (Mia, an aspiring actress and playwright, and Sebastian, a serious jazz pianist) who are winning characters sympathetically written and attractively portrayed by excellent actors (Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling.)
Stone and Gosling are radiantly attractive individuals and fine actors, but their skill at singing and dancing pales beside that of their supporting cast.
It’s a musical, right? So shouldn’t the stars be stellar singers and dancers? But the stars’ singing and dancing never rises above the level one might expect to see at any good high school performance, and the choreography created for them does not stretch them even to attempt to go beyond such a level.
For anybody who has ever been on stage in front of an audience, maybe you can imagine how maddening it might be to watch these two if you are one of those in the supporting cast, in the chorus line, so to speak, who can sing and dance so much better than the principals!
The music by Justin Hurwitz gives me a feeling of the almost and the not quite—it is the perfect accompaniment to a film where the point appears to be an embodiment of the meaning of life as being teased and disappointed.
The big opening production number, placed on a mile-long stretch of log-jammed LA freeway, is an imaginative outburst of energy and acrobatic dancing that sets up our expectation to watch a great new musical, something startling, something maybe as big as Hamilton or The Book of Mormon, or certainly something as compelling (perhaps in its own, more contemporary style) as something by Rodgers and Hammerstein or Stephen Sondheim. But as a musical story we don’t get halfway there and then are left deflated.
The music is disappointing too. Take “Mia and Sebastian’s Theme” for the perfect example of what I mean: it opens with a lovely tune in a sparse and sweet accompaniment, but not only is this material not developed well, halfway through the piece it veers way off into a gratuitous swirl of spiky jazz riffs which evoke not love fulfilled but love unraveled and lost, and the piece eventually crashes in an ugly smoking hole in the ground for no good reason that we can see. This destination is not the place where the film set us up to hope it would fly to. But of course this place is where the film does shore up at the end, namely, love lost and thwarted—and this seems to be the point of the film.
So the worst thing about the film is that it set me up to expect what I long for in art, namely a work that purveys beauty and celebrates the uplifted human spirit, and, in the end, the movie delivered me into the arms of that deflated human spirit that accepts disappointment and the halfway, if not outright crushing defeat, as the proper and normal outcome of our lives.
I yearn for beauty and uplift. La La Land falls down a rabbit hole and snuffs out any such hope.
There is a place for tragedy, even on the landscape of the uplifting. Think of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, Ayn Rand’s We the Living, or to pick a contemporary example, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s stunning film, The Lives of Others. We do not feel diminished for having lost a hero in these stories. We feel that life is sweeter and that our own venture into the world can be imbued with the most exalted stuff of life. But I felt that La La Land takes us halfway up the mountain and drops us in a ditch along the way.
My expectation of such a big inspiring musical was also aroused by how so many of the scenes were painted on a huge canvas in sweeping colors. But in the end we get a small frame and a big smear of paint where a hero’s face should have glowed.
E P N
2017.0130
