Here’s to the fools who dream.
My screening of La La Land was at the AMC 13 in Lincoln Center. The walls of the building are covered in recently painted homages to Old Hollywood: LA street signs fade into studio sets fade into images of Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. The entrance to the movie theater itself is flanked by twin ionic columns, hollow wooden monuments straight out of Spartacus. It felt apt, walking in, that the multiplex was trying to convince my plus-one and I that we were entering an old movie palace, the kind of place one might have seen Singing in the Rain back in 1952.
The musical La La Land opens in modern day, with a long line of cars sitting in back-to-back traffic on an LA freeway. As the camera rolls by, radio stations from each front seat blend in and out of each other – there’s pop and classical, hip-hop and showtunes, jazz and folk. All the drivers are young, in the prime of their lives, sitting against their music. When a young woman leaps out of her car and dances down the lane, it gives everyone else permission to do the same, and soon a cavalcade of bright young faces is leaping and tapping and cartwheeling their way down the street and onto the hoods of empty vehicles; at one point the back of a truck opens and a group of percussionists hand a rhythm down to a dance circle as it materializes in front of them. After a third chorus about how “It’s Another Sunny Day (In LA)!”, everyone finds their seat again and waits for life to move them on down the road.
The tonal clashes of the opening scene – a millennial rat race of isolated faces that explodes into a chorus of optimistic movement, before dissolving back into tedium – are the starkest, broadest ones in the film. Over the course of two hours, La La Land’s goal becomes to justify the coexistence of these realities, to prove their viability and necessity next to each other. The result is a film of astounding emotional honesty and hope – one that proves, even more than Whiplash, that Damien Chazelle is an incredibly gifted storyteller.
A moment after the opening number we’re greeted with a title card – WINTER, it says – and it is here we meet our two lovers, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, as they exchange a moment of road rage on their way into the city. He honks at her half a dozen times, then shakes his head and speeds on by. She gives him the finger.
Gosling plays Sebastian, a struggling pianist with an obsessive passion for Jazz’s golden age. At the restaurant where he gigs in the evening, his boss (JK Simmons) won’t let him play anything but Holiday standards, “Jingle Bells” and the like. As will happen many times throughout the movie, fantasy invades reality: a few songs in, all the light drains from the room, excepting a single spotlight on Sebastian, as he breaks out of his “Holly Jolly Christmas” prison and into a free jazz number. At its end, he stands up in defiance, as if he’s just composed his masterpiece. Everyone stares at him. His boss calls him over and fires him on the spot.
Mia (Stone), happens to have wandered into the place after another brown-nosing party in the Hollywood Hills. She’s an actress – she was running lines in traffic when Sebastian began honking at her earlier – and though she’s been in LA for 6 years the town still doesn’t quite agree with her. She never looks comfortable walking in heels, despite the fact that she’s always wearing them, or being made to wear them, and her auditions, as we see them, are a series of unfortunate encounters with professional disrespect and artistic invalidation. Her bedroom walls are covered in tableaus of Old Hollywood, and she grew up watching black-and-white films at a local theater with her father. Both of our lovers are romantics, their nostalgia for a time they never really knew shaping their dreams for the future.
It’ll be awhile before the two actually get together – SPRING, to be exact – but the movie jumps the time gleefully, excited to get to the good stuff. And it’s so, so good – the first duet of the movie is somehow both adorable and subtly moving, helped on by the fact that our two leads are so clearly not singers or perfect dancers. Their movements are casual and delicate, their voices soft and self-conscious. We get to appreciate the tenderness in each gesture all the more by Chazelle’s direction: all of the musical bits, including the opening showstopper, are uncut, seen in one take by a fluid and patient eye. Even much of the standard dialogue is covered this way, with long shots of Stone’s iconic doe eyes and Gosling’s piercing, sad downward gaze.
Both actors ingest the film with what I can only sappily describe as bucketfulls of love. But it’s Stone who truly steals the heart of the thing. Her first close-up seemed to still the theater completely, and it is sort of wondrous that, if Chazelle’s goal is to make a certain kind of Old Hollywood studio musical relevant again, he’s also managed to make a modern-day starlet of his lead; the tendency not to cut quickly becomes a generous one, because Stone is so strikingly open, so full of that dreamy, grounded effervescence we don’t get to see actors play with in serious movies anymore.
As we rotate through seasons, Mia and Sebastian’s story unfolds much as one might expect. But it’s such a convincingly told tale that whenever someone begins singing or dancing or playing the piano we sit forward, thrilled that we were going to get another slice of singing and dancing. That’s an incredible thing, and it’s where so many musicals fail: to make breaking into song feel like it’s the only viable option, the most natural thing in the world, because reality just won’t cut it anymore.
The Real World, though, still maintains a strong presence throughout, reminding us of where we are in time and in space. iPhones are constantly interrupting intimate moments, traffic continues to be a concern for everyone, scheduling and money-making and the anxieties of modern life, the 24/7 rush of the 21st century, get in the way of the romance. As love and song and fantasy and heartbreak ensue, life-as-it’s-lived and life-as-it’s-dreamt-of collide over and over again, painting a portrait of existence – at least youthful existence – as dependent on an interweaving of the two.
The miracle of Chazelle’s movie is to use what we recognize as an old form to help propel big-budget, star-making films into the future. La La Land is an argument, both in its telling and its narrative, that nostalgia for the past and dreaming for the future can be essentially the same thing. Dreams are, of course, always part memory, and our memories are always colored by the way we dream of them. The film embraces this paradigm, insisting that, even if they never came to fruition, hopes one might have had for our future – daydreams and fantasies and imagined romances – still happened, in a way, because they happened to us. Walking out of the theater, the AMC’s plastic tributes to the days of movies past – the Sunset Blvd signs and faded marquees and directors in berets – felt empty and hollow in comparison, and yet they oddly still felt comforting, their fondness for the past still sweet and true and somehow hopeful in their own way.
La La Land is both heartbreaking and life-affirming, or love-affirming, at once. The ending provides us with a stunning coup de grace: a glorious, shameless, heartrending flash of fantasy brought on by a sobering moment of reality. It is at this crossroad that the movie’s belief in love – not a sappy, Hollywood belief in love’s perfectness but an honest faith in love’s complicated worth – is truly apparent. Love – dreaming of it, remembering it – can make us better; it can make us ourselves.
-Nick Vincennes
