La La Land (2016)
Review of La La Land (2016), directed by Damien Chazelle
It literally took me five years after it came out for me to watch La La Land. I knew all about it and had seen clips, particularly the one scene in which Stone and Gosling dance on the mountain above Los Angeles, but I just wasn’t interested in what I had heard about the movie. This is odd because I love what both of the characters do: I love jazz and its history, but, at the same time, I have this deep dream of actually becoming an actress myself.
What ended up getting me to watch this was an ongoing obsession with Emma Stone (I’ve been watching all of her movies lately, it’s a problem) and the fact that I like Damien Chazelle as a director.
You have no idea how excited I am for his upcoming release Babylon to come out; the 1920s is one of my all-time favorite decades in history. Although I haven’t seen much of Chazelle’s work, I know a weird amount of information about him.
Enough my with rambling—onwards with the review!
Two lost, creative souls trying to make in Los Angeles find refuge in each other.
La La Land is a very particular kind of film, one that you’d easily expect from Hollywood because Los Angeles itself actually plays some sort of a dreamy character. Take the image that I used above for this review.
While for aesthetic reasons the skyline is quite pretty to have our main characters dancing in front of, at the same time it’s giving that feeling that the world is watching these two perform. The lights of the city juxtaposed with the sunset seem to make it so that these two, who are well-lit in the impending darkness, are the only ones left in this destitute land. It’s kind of romantic.
Our female lead is Mia Dolan, a girl from Nevada just trying to make it as an actor in Los Angeles. She works as a barista on the lot for where films and televisions are filmed and she keeps going to one failed audition after another.
After her roommates decide that she needs to take a break and go to a luxurious party, she meets our male lead after her car is towed. He’s a jazz pianist who has just been fired from his job right then and there because he refuses to play Christmas music.
Amused, Mia compliments him as he storms off into the distance, but as fate has it, months later they meet again and click instantly. Sparks fly and suddenly these two just can’t get enough of each other.
We get beautiful shots of the pier (it’s a famous one, but I’m not too sure of which one it is—Santa Monica?) and them going on cute little dates and whatnot, but then the issue of creativity thrusts itself into the picture.
You see, our male lead, Sebastian, decides to give up his dream of being a jazz pianist in order to make money. He’s working with a band and doing pop-style music, which Mia knows isn’t him.
In the meantime, she’s been writing a one-act play, and when the time comes to actually perform it in front of an audience, Sebastian doesn’t show up. If Gone Girl didn’t teach us anything about whirlwind romances, you need to get out once it goes south. And so that’s what Mia does.
One of my key takeaways on the theme of this movie is to enjoy the happy moments you have with another. There wasn’t a lot of happiness at the end of their relationship, but, at the end of the day, when they’ve parted ways and managed to build careers that they’re both happy with, the two of them can still share a proud smile for one another when passing by.
It reminds of the tenderness of Patti Smith’s and Robert Mapplethorpe’s relationship. That when they broke up, they treated each other with such kindness and respect, then she went ahead and wrote her memoir Just Kids to preserve his memory despite the breakup.
I absolutely gush about that memoir and their relationship because it mirrors what we see in La La Land; something that seems so perfect, romantic, and out of a film at first can become something beautiful once they’ve parted ways. But they’ll always have the memories that were the essence of the relationship.
The one thing that honestly took me by surprise from the very beginning is that La La Land is a musical. And, to be upfront, I could’ve been easily entertained if it wasn’t a musical by the script alone, but the fact that it’s a musical knocks it down a few pegs for me.
The songs do add depth and meaning to the movie, but, at the end of the day, I just found them too distracting and didn’t care for them too much.
That’s what ended up frustrating me the most—the visuals are stunning, the costumes very on-point. But I couldn’t stand the songs at the end of the day, they were too much.
I see what the director was trying to evoke, especially with the 1960s film and old Hollywood influence that this movie is dripping in, but I just couldn’t get on board with it. I think it’s also because I hated both of Stone’s and Gosling’s singing.
Overall Thoughts
You’re going to be on one of three spectrums for this movie: you absolutely love it and think it’s your favorite movie ever, you think it’s a decent movie, or you hate it because you’re not into this genre of film or the story it tries to tell. I fall into the category of “it’s a decent movie.”
It’s got amazing cinematography, but the story feels like something that I personally wouldn’t care for and would thus seek out as entertainment.
The fact that it depicts love as something imperfect and very flawed is interesting to me because clearly these two have a lot of love for each other. Their craft merely came first and it was a case of missed opportunity and wrong time to be together.
The songs are too gritting for me and I also didn’t care for the male lead. I was more invested in Mia’s story and would totally watch a spinoff of her trying to make it in Hollywood.
