It’s an interesting, albeit somewhat alarming, sensation to feel personally called upon by a seemingly objective form of media.
You’re sitting in a theater, your eyes comfortably adjusted to the dim lighting that falls to near total darkness, ready to take advantage of the now all-too-common assumption that film exists as a form of escapism. What combats that unaffected supposition, however, is the fact that you’re seeing “La La Land.”
This is a film that swells in its ambition, working on two different levels in its endeavor to break out of the plateau of passivity we’ve allowed films (and ourselves) to succumb to as of late. It is a film whose sheer palette is one to make the old buffs at Turner Classic Movies giddy, seeping like spilled paint into the dazzled subconscious of viewers who no doubt went home to dreams of wondrous Technicolor. It is here that “La La Land’s” achievements must first be realized.
Opening with title cards whose hazy film grain is the first reminder of movie days gone by, the film immediately draws attention to itself in every degree by being shot entirely in CinemaScope—a method used to shoot ‘widescreen-style’, allowing the camera to capture movement and scenery in an almost continuous motion that visually packs more into the scene we are viewing.
This technique is especially reminiscent of early Hollywood movie musicals, which were shot in a similar ‘continuous frame’ manner to limit the visual disruption of elaborate choreographed numbers, so you see them as they were meant to be presented on the stage. Being a movie musical itself—though an unconventional one—it is all but fitting “La La Land” would do the same.
But all the colors, the tangible textures, the well-spaced tap numbers and sense of theatricality reverberating off of this film’s every aspect—why does it matter? Firstly, it serves as a simple, even transparent, reminder. Namely, it calls to attention a fact that all know yet ignore: films can indeed still be made that way, in that elegant, thematically-designed composition that produces chords of well-pitched nostalgia. Upon hearing, such tonal stimulants are often wistfully left to the wind—the window shut, we return to the immobile present.
Such a film pays homage to well-known artistic elements of the past, without overly romanticizing a period where truthful, painful realities were often concealed over a veil of grandeur. This brings us to the second, perhaps most powerful appeal of “La La Land.”
We witness, over the course of two hours, a love affair. We also witness a love story, or two.
The relationship that unfolds and develops between Ryan Gosling’s Sebastian and Emma Stone’s Mia is refreshing, and romantic, and—dare I say?—realistic, where structural theatricality will allow.
And while their influence on one another becomes undoubtedly such that is not to be forgotten by either party, their relationship is—like all of those involving, however small, the dependence on another beating heart—fleeting. Hence, affair is a rightly suited ticket for what our hero and heroine go through.
The two love stories I alluded to occur between Sebastian and Mia and their respective careers, their dreams. We open the book of this story and alight on two people struggling to attain what is most important to them, struggling to get back up and say “Yes I can!” to the people who push them down, and struggling to regain their sense of direction and resourcefulness when they grapple with the possibility of “It’s not them, it’s me.”
Both Mia and Sebastian are committed to their dreams when they meet, and despite individual hurdles that each faces in light of doubt and external and internal obstacles, it becomes increasingly clear that this film is less about Mia and Sebastian living domestically happily ever after, and more about what they will do with the lessons learned from each other about themselves as they continue to chase their own loves.
These are two people who meet, fall in love and use the appreciation and admiration they hold for the other in their pursuit of success as fuel for their own ambitions. We view Sebastian’s soulmate in the art of jazz, and Mia’s in performance, in her story—not in each other.
We witness small climaxes, descents, large and small rising actions that result in neither anything grand nor traditionally life-changing. We witness two people who happen upon each other and have an effect. But what we see is a mere chapter in each character’s respective story, and it is essential that we recognize that theirs cannot entirely be summed up in the span of two hours, any more than ours can. In other words, we witness life—in its cruelest, uninspired and most beautiful form.
Here is where this film deviates from what has generally become accepted as the purpose of film media; “La La Land” confronts, it exposes without binding itself to an austere or visually raw tenor that some deem only the truest exposé pieces may harbor.
We are presented with a piece of cinema that uses the alluring artistic elements of the past to get our attention, never letting up on the realities and the feelings of insignificance that too often sketch the human experience once it has our eyes and ears.
Mia and Sebastian encounter a world of disappointment, unfulfillment and most disparaging, self-doubt—experiences we too encounter daily. But their light at the end of the tunnel is the achievement of what they were meant to do in this life, the pursuit of which is done with a fervor and a passion that constitutes this film as a profound love story of unconventional proportions.
Mia and Sebastian are foolish enough to do what all around us we are told not to do—to dream. “La La Land” wants us—the young, the old, the confused, the tired, the relentless—to not only dream, but act. Though our hearts may ache, break, our paths go askew and turn messy, this film wants us to keep going—to reach and do, foolish as it all may seem.
It is an homage to those who do and a call to action to those who stand on the precipice, clear as the searing trumpet that filters into the film’s score and haunting as the piano chord permeating throughout.
It hums, “Here’s to us.”
