by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I deliberately wanted a
movie that would at least briefly take my mind off all the depressing coverage
of today’s midterm elections, and I also had a DVD of a film I’d been curious
about since its release: La La Land,
writer-director Damien Chazelle’s generally successful attempt to make an
old-fashioned musical that would also reflect modern sensibilities. When the
film first came out, the story as outlined in the reviews — aspiring actress Mia
(Emma Stone) falls in love with jazz musician Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) and they
have an affair, but their respective ambitions ultimately part them for a
bittersweet ending — sounded so much like Martin Scorsese’s New York,
New York (1977) I figured Chazelle had
thought, “Hey! Let’s do New York, New York in Los Angeles!” Actually it turned out to have been a story Chazelle
and Justin Hurwitz, who wrote the film’s songs, cooked up together back when
they were college students in Boston and it was originally set there, though as
it evolved they seem to have realized it had to take place in a city that was a
major hub of the entertainment industry which would draw aspiring actors,
singers and musicians and enable them to meet while they pursued their dreams.
After suffering through all those Lifetime movies that had good moments but
fell short of their potentials, La La Land was the reverse: a movie whose whole was greater than the sum of its
parts. There are flaws: the songs (except for “Audition,” the wrenching piece
with which Emma Stone’s character auditions for a movie, which would be a
viable replacement for Stephen Sondheim’s “Send In the Clowns” for real-life
auditions and performances by cabaret-style singers) aren’t especially
memorable, and neither Ryan Gosling nor Emma Stone are exactly the world’s most
scintillating musical performers.
Stone is one of those actresses who are
perfectly serviceable singing and dancing, but no more than that — it’s hard on
the basis of this film to believe that she starred as Sally Bowles in a
successful stage revival of Cabaret,
or that Chazelle saw her in that show and decided from it that she’d be the
right person to play the female lead here — and Gosling has virtually no voice
at all. (One key plot point is that he owns a piano stool previously used by
Hoagy Carmichael, and the comparison is actually apt because Carmichael never
had much of a voice, either, but he phrased well and he had enough of a voice
to put his own songs over.) But they’re good enough actors they can convince us
they’re better singers and dancers than they are —much the way Frank Sinatra
once said of his musicals with Gene Kelly at MGM, “I could never dance, but
Gene Kelly made me look as if I could.” La La Land’s greatest strengths are its visual look — Charles
joked that the brilliant, vibrant color design looked as if Natalie Kalmus had
come back from the grave to supervise it — and Chazelle’s skill at drawing on
the plot conventions and clichés of 1930’s and 1940’s musicals while still putting
enough of a modern “spin” on them that one could accept La La Land as a story taking place today. (New York,
New York was a period musical, made in the
late 1970’s but set in the late 1940’s.) One can note all the borrowings from
musical classics, as well as the deliberately retro character of the film’s
visual look — it begins with a special black-and-white version of the Summit
Entertainment logo and the classic “Filmed in CinemaScope” logo from the 1950’s
(though the film was actually shot in Panavision because no usable CinemaScope
lenses still exist) — and its alternation between speaking and singing.
Unlike
such other recent musicals as Chicago and Dreamgirls, it
doesn’t present the characters singing and dancing only when they would be
doing so for real (though Chicago
anticipated this movie in its alternation between normal reality and musical
fantasy and its use of songs as much to comment on the story as to tell it), and its main story
takes place over a year and it’s divided by titles reading “Winter,” “Spring,”
“Summer” and “Fall” (a device I suspect Chazelle borrowed from Meet
Me in St. Louis, another film with the name
of a city in its title) — though there’s a great gag in which, right after we
see the big opening number, “Another Day of Sun,” with characters singing and
dancing on top of their cars as they’re stuck in a freeway traffic jam (I noted
that in a musical set in New York there’s a number on the subway; in L.A. we
get one in a traffic jam), we see a title reading “Winter” over bright, sunny,
cloudless skies. (I suspect that joke was even funnier to someone who lives in
a place that actually has snowy winters than it is to a lifelong Californian
like me.) Sebastian and Mia “meet-cute” on that freeway when Sebastian’s sporty
convertible cuts off Mia’s plain-Jane sedan, and they meet again at a dull
Hollywood party Mia has been talked by her girlfriends into going to in hopes
of meeting some influential people who can give her parts. (In today’s “#MeToo”
climate I worried that she’d run into some lecherous Harvey Weinstein-type
asshole who’d sexually assault her, and maybe if this film had been made in
2018 instead of 2016 she would have met Sebastian when he saved her from some
lecherous producer trying to rape her.) Mia is living with three roommates and
working as a barista in a coffeehouse on the Warner Bros. studio lot; Sebastian
is an aspiring pianist who wants to play serious jazz — he gets to sit in with
a band at the Lighthouse (not coincidentally the name of a real L.A. jazz club
in the 1950’s owned by bassist Howard Rumsey, who also led the band there) and
has hopes of taking over the legendary Van Beek jazz club, which now offers
“samba and tapas,” and starting his own jazz club there which he wants to call
“Chicken on a Stick” after one of the supposed origin stories for jazz great
Charlie Parker’s nickname, which first was “Yardbird” and then got shortened to
“Bird.” (According to this movie, it came from Parker’s taste for fried
chicken; other versions I’ve heard was that he was briefly in the military
until he washed out and “Yardbird” was a common name for a private in World War
II, and the one I think is most credible, that when he was growing up in Kansas
City passers-by would walk past the Parker home and see and hear him practicing
in the back yard.)
To support himself Sebastian takes a job as an anodyne
cocktail-lounge pianist cranking out Christmas songs — until he goes into a
jazz piece he’s learned by ear from a Thelonious Monk record and the owner
fires him on the spot — and later he gets a gig as keyboard player for a band
called “The Messengers” led by an old college friend of his, Keith (John
Legend). The benefit is that the job is well paid and will enable him to amass
enough savings he can finally open his club after two years; the downside is
that the Messengers are so continually busy either recording or touring it
takes him away from L.A. — and from Mia — for that long. Meanwhile Mia goes on
a series of auditions — in one of which she’s playing a script much like Jean
Cocteau’s play The Human Voice,
in which a woman gets a telephone call from her lover saying he’s breaking up
with her (Chazelle copies Cocteau’s gimmick of only letting us hear her end of the call), only one of the people auditioning
her takes a phone call of their own while she’s in mid-performance. She decides
to book a theatre for a one-woman play referencing her origins in Boulder City,
Nevada, only the performance is a disaster — either no one shows or the people
who do come think she’s awful —
and the experience leads her to give up her dreams and move back to Boulder
City. Only in her absence Sebastian takes a phone call for her from a serious
casting director who wants her for a part in a big movie set in Paris, and he
drives out to Boulder City, traces her and brings her back to L.A. for the
audition. Mia gets the part and the film jumps forward five years — Mia is now
married to someone else and they have a three-year-old daughter, and they
stumble into Sebastian’s jazz club. There’s a fantastic (in both senses) dance
number that replays the events of Sebastian’s and Mia’s affair as a romantic
musical production — I joked that this was the film’s Bollywood ending
(producers in India are notorious for ending their movies with big musical numbers
that have either no relation at all or only a tangential one to the overall
plot), only to cut back to the bittersweet reality.
La La Land ends the way I always thought the Fred
Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical Swing Time should have ended — with Astaire and Rogers literally dancing out of each other’s lives to the song “Never Gonna
Dance” and the overall story being one of two people who loved each other very
much but were unable to make their relationship work — only in 1936 no one at
RKO was willing to dare an unhappy ending for an Astaire-Rogers movie and
there’s a silly postlude to get Fred and Ginger together at last. The ending
Chazelle wrote was a hard sell in the 21st century, too; the
imdb.com “Trivia” page on the film indicates that before Summit and producer
Marc Platt greenlighted it, Chazelle got a lot of requests from potential
producers to rewrite the ending for a more conventional musical finish in which
Sebastian and Mia end up together after all. I think the film is far more
powerful the way it is, even though the bittersweet ending was used in New
York, New York as well. On the whole,
Chazelle’s film is a lot happier
and less angst-ridden than
Scorsese’s — though Ryan Gosling’s character has its eccentricities, it’s a
much more normal person than he usually plays (indeed, this film is the first
half of the fulfillment of my long-standing wish, completed with his casting as
Neil Armstrong in the moon-flight film First Man, that some casting director somewhere would cast
Gosling as someone normal
already, and now that that’s happened I maintain the same wish for Paul Dano!),
and there’s an obvious contrast between him and Scorsese’s male lead, Robert De
Niro, as both characters and “types.” I quite liked La La Land for its artful blending of realism and fantasy — I
especially liked the scene in which Sebastian and Mia celebrate their new-found
love by literally dancing on air
(an effect I suspect Chazelle borrowed from one of Fred Astaire’s lesser-known
films, The Belle of New York,
where he decided to follow his gravity-defying room-turning solo in Royal
Wedding by dancing in mid-air: in 1952 the
only way Astaire could do that is to dance on a large pane of clear glass and
hope the technicians could figure out a way to light it without showing reflections
of the camera and lights, while Chazelle and his performers had access to CGI)
— and Charles said what he liked about the overall ending of the film is it
avoided the hair-shirt tragedy of the multiple A Star Is Borns and its progeny (as well as Theodore Dreiser’s Sister
Carrie and the 1952 film of it), in which
one of the lovers rises to huge stardom while the other is either ruined or
dead.
La La Land is a quite
likable movie, one which succeeds on its own terms in reviving the conventions
of old musical while at the same time putting enough of a modern “spin” on them
it’s believable as a story of today, and there are plenty of nostalgic symbols
in the movie, like the Rialto revival theatre — where Sebastian takes Mia to
see Rebel Without a Cause, only
the film literally breaks and burns in the projector during the screening — and
which later closes down and still later becomes the venue Mia rents for her
one-woman show. There’s also an irony in the plot strand involving “The
Messengers,” the band John Legend’s character leads — not only is he
appropriating the name of one of the most famous jazz bands of all time, Art
Blakey’s Jazz Messengers (a group that launched the careers of, among others,
Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter and the Marsalis brothers, Wynton
and Bradford), something one would expect Sebastian to take umbrage at, but
after Keith has lectured him about trying to revive the jazz styles of the
1940’s his own band plays the 1970’s funk style that fused hard-bop jazz and soul
music and paved the way for disco — so Keith’s act is in its own way as retro
as Sebastian’s. (There’s a real-life irony in that John Legend, a pianist, had
to learn guitar for this role, while Chazelle insisted that Gosling, an amateur
guitarist, had to learn piano well enough to be able to synchronize on screen
with the recordings of his piano double — to his credit, he didn’t want to use
a hand double or resort to those ghastly shots in which the bulk of the piano
is interposed between camera and actor so we can’t see what he or she is really doing with his fingers.) I can’t
say if La La Land deserved the
Academy Award for Best Picture it briefly won by mistake over the actual
winner, Moonlight, until I
actually see the latter film, but La La Land is certainly an estimable genre piece and a film of real quality and joy.
