So, this film came out about a year after my ex-wife and I separated. It was amicable, but for reasons I do not remember, she mentioned that her new boyfriend was taking her to the Alamo Drafthouse nearby to see this film. I’d been there a few times and offered her some tips on what to pick up for dinner, but then I asked how it was she was going to see a musical. She apparently had no idea La La Land was a musical for some reason–how she didn’t know that I had no idea–but she was not a fan of the genre and was put into something of a funk. I’d already seen the film and, quite frankly, loved it, so I tried to cheer her up a bit. Now, I never did find out whether she ended up enjoying it or not, or if I did it slipped my mind, but that was quite a bit of a visceral reaction to finding out the actors sing in the film.
That said, I wasn’t lying at the end of the Spotlight entry when I said this was the film that made me appreciate the musical.
What I learned was simple: musicals work best for me on the big screen when I can give them my full attention. At home, it’s too easy to be distracted when the singing starts. That, oddly enough, was also James Cameron’s reasoning to see the new Avatar in theaters. But it certainly holds true for me for the musical. Show me a musical on the big screen, and while that’s not a guarantee I’ll enjoy it, it does increase my likelihood of appreciating it. Maybe I’m showing more maturity as a filmgoer. Maybe I’ve just learned to appreciate that having a lot of people all break into simultaneous song and dance, a song and dance that the characters in the film are presumably making up as they go along, and while Past Me would have found my disbelief strained quite a bit, Present Me knows I’ve seen and accepted far weirder, so why not?
It helps that most modern musicals tend to be far more sophisticated in their storytelling than many classic musicals. Some of the AFI film entries I went through back in 2018 showed musicals where characters were awfully understanding about who the leads fell in love with, even if it meant their own personal loneliness. But some of the musicals I’ve seen since La La Land came out, films like the West Side Story remake or In The Heights were set in worlds where a good song or dance might not solve anyone’s problems. If anything, they can make people feel better about their life situations at least temporarily, but that’s about it. For me, La La Land was just the first musical to catch my attention to really do that. Heck, I named it my favorite film of 2016 based on the strength of the end of the film. More on that below, but what writer/director Damien Chazelle managed here was a film that both embraced the more idealistic tropes of the musical and deconstructed them a bit, a description that could work just as well as Chazelle’s most recent film, this past year’s Babylon. He managed to do it much better here, but it is something he’s got a minor knack for.
Stop to consider how the film opens: a Los Angeles traffic jam turns into a massive song and dance about living in the city, one where all the participants are, for the most part, dressed in solid colors, the lone exception seemingly the woman who started it has some polka dots on her blouse. The colors make the dancers stick out as they enjoy their time on the L.A. freeway, something that would normally not seem so enjoyably. Factor in as well that the whole number is disguised as one long continuous cut, and the film has already set itself up as something like the traditional musical. Then it immediately cuts to the car of Mia Dolan (Emma Stone) as she gets cut off a bit by Sebastian “Seb” Wilder (Ryan Gosling), during which the potential “meet cute” is cute short by one flipping off the other. That moment, a meeting that is cut short multiple times before the lead actors, people the advertising told audiences would be a couple, can finally get together is a sign of the less traditional aspects of Chazelle’s film, and quite frankly, that’s the sort of thing I can get into.
To be clear, Chazelle is clearly a fan of older movies and music. Seb is an aspiring jazz musician, one who reveres the likes of Charlie Bird and other old standbys, and coming off Whiplash, it’s not a surprise that Chazelle can write a good jazz musician/aficionado. Mia, by contrast, is a fan of old movies, and while I don’t think her interests get as much love and affection as his do, it’s still there. Now, I’ve been a fan of Stone since I saw her in Easy A and in Gosling since probably Blue Valentine. These are both highly talented, charismatic actors, to the point where Gosling reminds me of a young Brad Pitt in that it took me a few performances to see that Gosling, like Pitt, wasn’t just some pretty boy actor but actually a pretty talented performer in his own right. I don’t know if I would say either Gosling or Stone are particularly good singers or dancers, but I do know I tend to enjoy them both of them in all kinds of films. Putting them together into this one just made a lot of sense.
However, the casting isn’t why this film ultimately got my top pick for that year. That came from how the film progressed. Sure, it started off in many ways as a traditional musical, one where the leads fall in love during a moonlight dance before comically remembering one of them parked their car on the other side of the fourth wall. But there’s more going on here. Chazelle has basically been pushing these two to pursue their respective dreams. Seb is arguably louder about it, but Mia goes on auditions, Seb finds ways to pay bills by playing other people’s music, and life goes on. It probably isn’t a coincidence that the film takes very familiar music–Christmas standards and the music of an 80s cover band–as the low points in Seb’s creative life. But then the film focuses on the real question of the film: can these two have their dreams, each other, or both?
The answer the film comes up with is arguably the most realistic possible answer. As much as the film looks like a fantasy–Mia’s apartment is HUGE considering she’s a struggling actor even with three roommates but they need the room to dance in–as the film goes on, the story arguably becomes more realistic. When Mia and Seb’s relationship hits a rough spot, it’s noteworthy that there’s no singing involved at all, and that neither Mia nor Seb sing much of anything until later when Mia finally goes to a successful audition. And from there, the film cuts ahead to five years later and sure enough, the film’s question is answered: Seb and Mia can have their dreams, but they can’t have each other.
Yeah, that was a pleasant surprise for me when I saw this film the first time. Mia is happily married to another man with a daughter, and she’s a highly successful actress. Seb has his jazz club, and the place is rocking. And when Mia and her husband wander in one night, Seb spots them, plays their old song, and after an elaborate and beautiful dream sequence, one that showed the pair didn’t sell out, got everything they wanted, and still achieved their dreams, where even grumpy old J.K. Simmons can offer them a smile, and it’s easily one of the sweetest dream sequences I think I’ve ever seen on the big screen, it sure does look like a traditional ending to a musical.
And then it ends, snapping back to reality. Mia and Seb are not a couple, but they exchange looks, looks that say neither really regrets where they are. They seem to be happy and wish each other well, glad for what they had together but at the same time, pleased with what they have in the present too. There’s not going to be some big reconciliation between Mia and Seb. This isn’t that sort of film. It’s one where sometimes relationships don’t work out, but that’s OK. Better things can be out there for anyone, and a relationship that doesn’t work out isn’t the end of the world. That’s the sort of thing I can really get behind. Get me more musicals like that, and I’ll really learn to appreciate the genre.
NEXT: After a string of more recent films, time to go back to a classic of the horror genre that came out when I was a small child: 1979’s Alien.
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