La La Land recieved a glowing review from Joe Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal's movie critic
https://www.google.com/amp/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/la-la-land-review-thats-entertainment-1481209205?client=safari‘La La Land’ Review: That’s Entertainment
Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling star in a joyous musical that evokes Hollywood’s golden age
By Joe Morgenstern
Dec. 8, 2016
“La La Land” is a crowd-pleaser if ever there was one, and I couldn’t be more pleased to be part of the crowd. Damien Chazelle ’s musical, consistently daring and occasionally sublime, does what the movies have all but forgotten how to do—sweep us up into a dream of love that’s enhanced in an urgent present by the mythic power of Hollywood’s past.
The lovers are Mia, an aspiring actress and practicing barista, and Sebastian, a struggling jazz pianist who is dedicated, however precariously, to helping keep jazz alive; they’re played, respectively and superlatively, by Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. Both Mia and Seb are enchanted by the past. She works in a coffee shop on the Warner Brothers lot within sight of the movie-set window, she tells him, that Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman looked out of in “Casablanca.” He owns a piano stool that Hoagy Carmichael once sat on, and treats it like a shrine.
Mr. Chazelle finds the past enchanting too, but he uses it astutely without becoming its prisoner. It’s as if he’d summoned up everything he loves from the golden age of movie musicals—including the sweet clichés—and hit a refresh button. The result, untainted by sentiment or fashionable irony, is a bittersweet love story told through exuberant dance, lovely music (by Justin Hurwitz, with lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul ), exquisite lighting and fantastical colors (the cinematographer, Linus Sandgren, shot on 35mm film in CinemaScope), and a succession of tender, funny or heart-stopping encounters between two captivating dreamers.
The opening number, “Another Day of Sun,” sets a high bar for ambition and audacity. Gridlock has struck an L.A. freeway on-ramp; it’s the worst traffic jam seen on the big screen since Jean-Luc Godard ’s 1967 “Weekend.” (It’s also a feat of technical virtuosity; the sequence takes place on a real freeway ramp while real traffic flows nearby in real time.) The camera moves past motionless cars and frustrated drivers rocking in rhythm to a Babel of music on their car radios. One of them, a pretty woman in a yellow dress, starts singing a song of her own, then gets out of her car and, before you can say Debbie Reynolds or Cyd Charisse, dances a dance that turns into a contagion. Soon the on-ramp becomes a serpentine stage for a chorus line of drivers and passengers who do backflips on the pavement and sing out from the rooftops of their cars.
The most conspicuous holdouts from all this euphoria are Sebastian and Mia. He sits in his 1980s Buick convertible, listening to boppish piano riffs on the car’s cassette player. She’s in her Prius, directly in front of him, chattering on her phone. When traffic finally starts to move she’s too distracted to notice, so he gives her a blast on his horn and she flips him the bird. Their next encounter, one of those fateful accidents without which there’d be no plot, doesn’t go much more smoothly.
When they come together a third time, though, it’s on a luminous night in Griffith Park overlooking the lights of the San Fernando Valley, and they re-enact, without realizing it—their innocence being part of their charm—one of those classic scenes in which Fred and Ginger keep resisting each other until, irresistibly, they sing, they dance and they fall in love. (Another re-enactment, quite intentional on Mia’s part, involves a celebrated scene from “Rebel Without a Cause” and leads to a surreally beautiful sequence in the Griffith Observatory planetarium.)
A word of proportion, rather than caution, about these musical numbers. This is not the golden age of Hollywood, in case you hadn’t noticed. “La La Land” was not produced with the prodigious resources of MGM at its zenith, and the movie’s co-stars, far from being larger-than-life icons, are very much of this time. Their dancing is more endearing than dazzling. Their singing stirs the heart without shaking the rafters. If they were more polished they’d be less appealing to today’s moviegoers.
That said, however, the production designed by David Wasco is more than sufficiently sumptuous. Ms. Stone summons up a plenty-good-enough voice that carries breathy echoes of Audrey Hepburn in “Funny Face” or Catherine Deneuve in “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” and she combines it with startling fervor in Mia’s climactic audition, the effect of which is stunning. Mr. Gosling’s performance is understated, with a tinge of touching earnestness, but it’s also witty and commandingly smart. What’s more, he does Seb’s fluent piano playing without benefit of doubles on screen or on the sound track, an achievement I found astonishing. The two had a terrific bedroom scene together in “Crazy, Stupid, Love.” Here, with Mr. Chazelle directing from his own screenplay, they’re perfection from start to finish. ( John Legend is impressive as a musician who seduces Sebastian with commercial success in a subplot that spills a bit of air from the narrative’s sails.)
Jazz figured crucially in Mr. Chazelle’s previous feature, “Whiplash,” a relentlessly dramatic—and commercially successful—story of a young drummer obsessed with perfection and the ruthless teacher who pushes him to the breaking point. Still, there was nothing in that tightly wound film to predict the lyrical, breakout looseness of this one. Go back, however, to “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench,” the filmmaker’s gritty 2009 debut feature, and a lot of “La La Land” is there in microbudget, black-and-white incipience: strong music by Mr. Hurwitz; a jazz musician hero (a trumpeter in this instance); a heroine who sings stream-of-consciousness songs on public streets and launches into a spontaneous song-and-tap-dance routine set in a restaurant. What isn’t there, of course, is Mr. Chazelle’s spectacular growth as an artist during the past few years, and a pair of movie stars, each of them peerless in their own way, who’ve brought his buoyant vision to fruition.
So how will that vision play to contemporary audiences? With layered feelings in the case of older movie lovers like me who grew up on classic musicals—intense involvement with what’s up there on the screen, plus nostalgia for a time when we were enthralled by the themes re-enacted here and didn’t have a clue that they’d already become clichés. The larger question is how much Mr. Chazelle’s musical will appeal to young moviegoers, with their supposed resistance to a genre in which people burst into song and dance for no logical reason. I seldom try to second-guess box-office prospects, but I’m hoping that “La La Land” will be a hit for the ages, for all ages. It’s a film that re-enacts, with rare originality, a classic role for the movie medium—escapist entertainment in troubled times.
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Write to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com
