Consider the passion in a film like La La Land. It’s a film that is passionate about a great many things – music, cinema, love, heartbreak, Los Angeles, to name a few. It carries its passion on its sleeve, and parades it unabashedly before the audience. It cares about all these things deeply, and works tirelessly toward getting you to care too. La La Land doesn’t do subtle. You’d think the whole act would get tiresome, but Damien Chazelle’s latest film is actually extraordinary because of that passion. In a scene near the middle of the film, a jazz musician played by Ryan Gosling explains to an actress played by Emma Stone about why he loves jazz. He does this in front of a five-piece jazz band that performs before them. The sequence is one of the best in the film, it cuts between trumpets and saxaphones, cymbals and guitar frets. It’ll probably help you recall Chazelle’s last film, Whiplash, which was a harsh drama about a committment to excellence within a student jazz conservatory. The harshness is washed away here, but Chazelle’s supreme sense of rhythm and timing – his inate sense of directing a film like he’s playing an instrument – is readily apparent. Whiplash put Chazelle on the map, but La La Land proves he’s one of Hollywood’s top filmmakers.

Stone plays Mia, a young woman living in Los Angeles who dreams of becoming an actress but works mostly as a cashier for a coffee shop on the Warner Brothers lot. Her free time is mostly consumed by auditioning for roles in front of casting directors who seem to have little time or interest in her. Gosling plays Sebastian, a stubborn, temperamental jazz pianist who can’t keep a job in a world slowly moving away from true jazz appreciation. A few chance meetings bring Mia and Sebastian together where, through a few choice song and dance numbers, they realize their feelings for one another. La La Land does not rely on a will they, won’t they tension; the conquest is the easy part. They come together in a city filled with people chasing dreams, but stay together because they both realize each other’s talent and each other’s worth, but things become melancholy when the two realize that the prize of a dream can be your greatest sacrifice. Chazelle’s screenplay is part classic Hollywood, part bittersweet dramedy. The film is knee deep in the films of Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, but still has times to make cinematic and thematic references to Paul Thomas Anderson. La La Land alludes to a nostalgia, while accepting that nostalgia does nothing to bring those happy times back. At one point in the film, Mia worries a play she wrote might be too nostalgic, Sebastian responds “Fuck ’em!”.

At the core of La La Land is a surprisingly thorough document of youth, about the hopes and dreams and behaviors of living in an exciting city and still having your future ahead of you. It sings cheerfully about a time when practicality can be put on hold, when we allow our emotions to overrun the system. About the exhilaration of love, and the equal exhilaration of love lost. Chazelle is able to craft such a brilliant balancing act of crafting the fantasy the characters have in their mind with the harsh realities of life’s inpredictabilities. La La Land wants it both ways, and manages to pull it off. Manipulations abound, but they’re not cheap, they’re consequential in characterization and narrative. Mia and Sebastian are given the ability to fly (literally) off into their own hopes and dreams, but Chazelle’s script is so careful, so smart, that it does not avoid actual truth about what this relationship means to these people. La La Land can blubber at times, in regards to its central romance, but that’s what young love is. It’s filled with irrationality, an ignorance of the “writing on the wall”. Believe it or not, it shares similarities with Gosling’s Blue Valentine, but that film was a biting melodrama – it doesn’t forgive its characters’ shortcomings. La La Land is a celebration of that irrationality and its purity.

Whiplash showed great skill from Chazelle, but La La Land shows such a sharp meticulousness, an attention to cutting, blocking, and of course singing and dancing. The music and songs were written by former Chazelle classmate Justin Hurwitz. The songs themselves have a swift lightness about them, always managing to perform Chazelle’s melancholy balance, never becoming too twee or too melodramatic. The film’s opening number “Another Day of Sun” is probably the film’s weakest (for one it postpones our introduction to Gosling and Stone, and does little more than provide Chazelle a chance to craft a complicated sequence with long, challenging takes), but after that the music works perfectly as a catalyst for the audience to be swept into Chazelle’s musical wonderland. La La Land is closer to the spectacle of Gene Kelly than the fierce cerebralness of Bob Fosse or the traditionalism of the more contemporary Rob Marshall. Amongst the things that Chazelle is wishing to return throughout La La Land is the shamelessness of film replecating stage musicals, of expanding the possibilities of the musical to its ultimate breaking point. The hifalutin sequences are so skillful, so beautiful, you hardly notice the sheer volume of braggadocio in the filmmaking.

This feels like the culmination of everything we ever wanted from Emma Stone. The twenty-eight-year-old actress has been such a consistent positive presence in Hollywood for close to a decade, and La La Land seems to capture every skill she possesses. The stunning blue eyes are shown brightly by Chazelle every time the director gets the chance, but her skill of singing and dancing speaks for itself. But aside from the technicality of the performance, Stone’s portrayal of a fraying occupational drive mixed with that rich, bubbling feeling of romance is the film’s greatest highlight. Simply said, Stone is phenomenal, a note-perfect portrayal of youthful naievte in the face of oncoming adulthood. Across from her, Gosling doesn’t possess the same singing ability, but he more than makes up for it with this stunning abilities at the piano (if that’s cinematic trickery, than bravo to that brilliant level of hand-swapping). It’s becoming more and more obvious to me that Gosling is an actor dependant on the talent of his director. His charm can come off as aloof, his stunning handsomeness can be confused for vapidness, when put in the wrong hands. Chazelle gives Gosling a script that the actor can really succeed in. We’ve seen Gosling and Stone have chemistry before, in the much underappreciated Crazy, Stupid, Love, but Chazelle captures something incredible here, a true fusion of two movie stars, one boldly taking a stage she’s always seemed to be on the verge of snatching (Stone), and another generous enough to let her get there (Gosling).

I mentioned that particular sequence of Sebastian explaining his love for jazz. I think it works so well because it is obviously Chazelle himself telling us why he loves jazz, the importance it cradles inside of his heart. Maybe one day he can make a film that doesn’t rely so heavily on jazz as a major construction piece, but it’s still remarkable how through three features, he’s managed to take the highly improvisational music genre and meld it within very strictly structured, emotionally complicated screenplays. I, for one, was impressed by Whiplash, but did not love it. A second viewing takes away the movie’s visceral edge, and the screenplay’s murky ethics regarding musical pedagogy leaves me queasy at times. What I do love is that Chazelle can make a film as nihilistic as Whiplash and follow it up with something as wondrously accepting as La La Land. One can proceed to trump Chazelle’s formalistic achievement, or the incredible chemistry between his two stars, but I’m willing to admit that my admiration comes mostly from the sense of the movie making me feel an effervescence so rare in the turbulent 2016. Some films are just capable of creating that kind of responsibility-free adoration, where one avoids nitpicking certain screenplay crutches or imperfections. It feels like that was what Chazelle was going for here, and he accomplishes it stupendously.

 

 

Written and Directed by Damien Chazelle