CAPSULE: La La Land (2016, Dir. Damien Chazelle)

I exist in a fantasy world where Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone got together in Crazy, Stupid, Love (after that pantingly hot Dirty Dancing sequence) and they continue to live in movie star bliss, occasionally giving us glimpses into their passionate day to day life through the magic of cinema.

It keeps me going.

Trust Damien Chazelle’s La La Land to arrive to shit all over my dreams and my love of movie musicals.

This reverential nostalgia didn’t ping for me. Stone, as coffee shop serving aspirant actress, and Gosling, as stick in the mud jazz club purist, dance around each other on their way to their artistic nirvanas. Love. Loss. Compromise. All set to the colour and pageantry of (just about every variant of) the movie musical.

Unfortunately, though he aims for the classics, Chazelle only reaches their low-rent counterparts. Pitch at The Young Girls of Rochefort, get Everybody Says I Love You… or Xanadu.

Some of this disinterest in all this I am willing to put down to my unfamiliarity with Los Angeles. I’ve never been to the City of Angels and I’m none too interested in going. I’ve many a time been on the lonelier side of the critical divide only to be faced with “You’d like it more if you’d been to L.A.” That as may be. Life’s too short to try to wring beauty out of traffic jams and low level concrete.

To his credit, Chazelle gives it a good go in his accessing the work of the dream makers of Hollywood’s yesteryear. I recognise the distance between the movie industry’s banality and its dreamlike output. I recognise the gulf between pressing pavement and floating on movie star air. I see that there is some structural motivation for his decisions here and I see the parallels Chazelle draws narratively and meta-narratively. It is just that I don’t think seeing them is enough. It doesn’t excuse La La Land’s constant shorthand, its you-can-fill-in-the-blanks character development, or its lack of magic.

We get the razzle but none of the purpose. An example: compare the dance coda from An American in Paris or The Red Shoes (or even the ballet in Oklahoma) – all audacious, all lengthy (15 minutes, 17 minutes, 15 minutes) and all (well, most) absolutely integral to the film’s overall narrative. Not so with La La Land. Chazelle gives a 5 minute nod (albeit and impressive one) then lets it evaporate. It’s little more than decoration.

If Chazelle were as committed to movie musicals as he is to jazz, this could have been a whole other story.

And I wouldn’t have had to watch him sit atop this genre jukebox while he kicked my Gosling/Stone fantasy in the nuts.

★★★

Trailer: