I may be five years late to the party here, but I just watched La La Land for the first time. It’s a remarkable film in many ways, as I’m sure you may know, but to me it’s most remarkable in that it’s devastatingly close to a gesamtkunstwerk-ian triumph of the arts, but ultimately falls regrettably short. On the pros list, it incorporates aesthetics like no director not named Christopher Nolan, and has enough depth/quality of filmmaking to be an enduring classic. On the cons list, its marriage with music is half-baked at best and the characters at times seem to make decisions based on what would be maximally convenient for the storyline. It won me over initially with its deep symbolic interest and aesthetic richness, then proceeded to lose me with its implausible writing and giga-cringe-inducing music. On the whole, a good film that is tantalizingly close to being a great one.
Cue the opening song and dance. We never hear the motifs from this song and dance again in the film, I believe. Strike one, musically speaking, especially considering how many goddamn times the “City of Stars” motif gets re-used. The filmmakers proceed to redeem themselves with this:
Fucking gorgeous. I’m a mega-simp for Art Deco (I’m not alone in this, apparently) so the font on this title instantly guarantees my interest for another ten minutes at least. Plus the company copyright thing with the Roman numerals. Inject it into my veins.
One begins to pick up on the whole color-significance thing pretty quickly. You could just show me this screen capture from the movie:
…and I’d instantly tell you I’d want to watch it. I’m of course not the first to point this out, but the TLDR of the color-significance in this movie is that blue signifies creativity/control/a good relationship, red signifies reality/making ends meet, and yellow signifies change. Obviously purple/pink signifies some kind of conflict between red and blue. It’s quite odd that this work of art set in LA has the same sort of color significance scheme as another somewhat more popular work of art set in LA.
Anyway, for a movie as well-made as this one, one thing that bothered me was the film’s dogged reliance on the ages-old romcom “oh hey funny seeing you here” trope in order to get the characters together. This is basically the romcom equivalent of “help me step bro I’m stuck” and should probably be banned by the romcom writers’ union. Apparently running into someone randomly over and over is more likely to mean that they’re your soul mate than that they’re a stalker.
We also need to get out of the way that whoever did the music for this movie sucks horribly and that if you want to enjoy the movie, you’ll probably need to think of it as just a regular movie with the occasional bit of bad music than as a bona fide musical a la Hamilton. Adding the occasional 7th chord and a mega-cheesy jazzy glissando thing every 5 minutes does not mean you’re writing in the jazz style, dumbass – you probably should have listened to something other than contemporary top-40 radio to prepare for writing a musical movie about a jazz pianist. Even top-40 radio songwriters can write a melody, which the composer for this movie apparently can’t. D- grade. Moving on.
hey! I didn’t know you could go inside this building in GTA!
if they were trying to make a movie by hiring the male lead with the narrowest possible set eyes and the female lead with the widest possible set eyes, they succeeded
While the aesthetics of this movie are great, its single most meaningful aspect is the fact that it’s a rom-com firmly rooted in modernity. What do I mean by that? I mean the scene where we’re about to get a kiss and the music swells and then is interrupted by an iPhone ringtone. Gosling walks Stone to her Prius. All culturally relevant romantic narratives in recent memory (by culturally relevant I mean successful and societally pervasive to at least the extent that this movie was/is) have been rooted in the past, or at least in a fantasy world – think Downton Abbey, Twilight, etc. etc. There seems to be an implicit consensus that the real, contemporary world is not capable of producing fairytale-esque narratives. Where is the rom-com where the couple meets on Tinder? the tragedy of the text message that went slightly too far? For the most part, such stories simply do not exist. This may be one reason why La La Land was as successful as it was – if you’re looking for a realistic romantic narrative set in the present day, this movie plus Aziz Ansari’s Master of None are about the extent of your options, at least as far as reasonably popular works go. I’m not quite sure why this is the case, but I think it has something to do with a collective denial about the ways in which we digitally organize our social life. Nobody wants to watch a movie about the Tinder match that turned into a spouse because that’s not how we’d like our version of the story to play out. A break-up over text message makes for less dramatic shots than the IRL variety. Drama ensuing from a late-night Instagram DM is less sexy than drama ensuing from a drunken make-out. La La Land is really only partially rooted in contemporary reality (see also: chance encounters) but I think it deviates from the expected narrative enough to not be white noise.
Then again, the film can only partly be said to be modern because of its partial juxtaposition of modernity with a 1920s Art Deco aesthetic:
I’m not sure if this motif is leaned into enough to draw conclusions about its implications, but it’s certainly present enough to add some great aesthetics from time to time in the movie. It helps the movie stand out from the endless sea of generic movies currently being made, but like the music, it feels only partially integrated into the movie, and it kind of fades away as the movie goes on. So another missed opportunity to make something truly compelling out of what is otherwise just a strong point aesthetically. They could have switched to a 1930s aesthetic halfway through the movie or something! Instead, all we get is one shot of the Ingrid Bergman poster on the floor halfway through the movie.
Interesting, but it’s hard to say that there’s a cohesive theme going on here since this is all we get.
Ultimately, the movie ends with Emma Stone’s choice to keep her perfectly decent, un-romantic life (for which the color would be red) or cling to the creative, romantic, unknown life (for which the color would be blue.) You can already see where this is going:
Surprise surprise, she sticks with reality after exchanging a glance with Mr. Gosling. Compelling, I suppose, if perhaps predictable. The filmmakers do throw one last bone to us Art Deco simps:
In all, a movie that tantalizes us with the promise of basically being a Christopher Nolan romcom – it really would have been this if they’d taken the 1920s aesthetic to its logical ends, written the characters better, and given the film a more consistent voice – but ultimately disappoints, leaving us with essentially Hamilton, minus the decent music, incredible lyricism, and historical interest, plus a bit of aesthetic value. Worth watching, but only once.
On an unrelated note, I am basically the same in real life as Ryan Gosling’s character in this movie (we share very similar face shapes), plus the ability to play actually compelling music on the piano, minus the Thelonious Monk obsession, plus somewhat less narrowly-set eyes, minus a bit of dickishness, plus the ability to actually make real fucking money, minus the stubble-beard. Plus the ability to write sick-ass blog posts. So if you found yourself attracted to Ryan Gosling in this movie (which I don’t really know why you would, he’s really not the greatest male romcom lead) feel free to slide into the DMs of yours truly. Preferably if you bear some resemblance to Emma Stone.
With my inbox officially RIP’ed, until next time.