In R.E.M.’s visionary music video for “Everybody Hurts,” a familiar traffic jam becomes an unfamiliar act of protest. Connected by their shared pain, commuters of all creeds and colors begin an exodus from their cars: first one, then a few, then everyone, until they just disappear. I can’t think of a more appropriate post-11/8 song.
The opening of Damien Chazelle’s La La Land riffs on the same premise, though with a decidedly sunnier result. A Los Angeles highway has become a parking lot, as L.A. highways are wont to do, but one driver has decided to make the best of it, spontaneously exiting her car for a song and dance. Others follow suit, cavorting on or around their vehicles, until a full-on musical number, with choreography as acrobatic as it is cheerful, erupts on the clogged freeway. (It looks like it’s shot in one bravura take, but in the wake of Birdman, who knows?) Michael Stipe and company saw collective suffering in a clogged freeway; Chazelle sees joyful noise. Though you couldn’t tell it from his breakthrough feature Whiplash, he’s a glass-half-full kind of guy.
That, or he’s watched a lot of old studio musicals and comedies, to which La La Land plays postmodern homage. The movie contains its references to cellphones and Priuses, but its sparkle is charmingly retrograde. La La Land is born of deliberate artifice and implausibility, reflecting a cinematic era when characters danced their emotions and sang what they couldn’t otherwise articulate. Chazelle tells his story — boy meets girl, fill in the rest — with techniques wrested from the formal graveyard — irises and flash pans, shadow plays and scale models. His casting of Emma Stone surely had less to do with her vocal range, which leaves much to be desired, than because her face is perfectly tailored for slow, wondrous dolly shots.
Her character, like La La Land itself, is as old as the movies themselves. She plays Mia Dolan, an undiscovered ingénue with aspirations for the Silver Screen. She earns a piddling wage as a barista on the Warner Brothers lot while attending auditions for artless pilots and uninspired features, waiting for callbacks that never come. Her future love interest, Sebastian Wilder (Ryan Gosling), is in a similar career rut. A skilled jazz pianist and composer, he’s become resigned to low-paying, identity-draining projects — playing pool-party keytar in an ’80s cover band, or performing mindless background music at a posh restaurant.
In both instances, these lonely strivers bump into each other, the happenstance of which, in a city of 4 million, is not lost on Chazelle. Or on the characters themselves, who self-reflexively question their repeated meetings the moment before Sebastian swings around a lamppost against an impossibly romantic cityscape. Suddenly, they’re Astaire and Rogers, hoofing in front of a manufactured sunset, in a moment of bliss existing outside of this or any other time.
Not everyone will appreciate the film’s winking acquiescence to the fantasies of Hollywood lore, but if you don’t surrender to it, La La Land will be a long 128 minutes. It took me about 20 minutes of sitting through awkward, obviously fixed-in-post musical numbers to latch onto the movie’s wry self-referentiality and just go with it. It happened during a backstory-revealing conversation between Sebastian and his sister Laura (Rosemarie DeWitt), in which Sebastian reminds her of the particulars of his career predicament: That he got “shanghaied” and that “life’s got him on the ropes” — phrases no one has ever used outside of the screenplays or Ben Hecht, Preston Sturges or Billy Wilder (Wilder, let’s not forget, is Sebastian’s surname).
And so it is with much of La La Land’s dialogue, soundtrack and production design. The very notion of a “Warner Brothers lot” is an anachronism, and Chazelle re-creates it in all its glory. As Sebastian and Mia walk and talk around the backlot, actors in cowboy attire receive makeup in front of a quaint building with a marquee reading “saloon,” a filmmaker sits in a director’s chair that actually says “director,” and crewmembers move a splashy billboard on wheels. On our couple’s first date, a repertory screening of Rebel Without a Cause at the Rialto, a brain wrap in the 35mm film disrupts the experience the second they’re about to lock lips.
Luminously photographed for maximum escapism, Mia and Sebastian’s courtship is like a fetish object produced from the assembly line of the Hollywood dream factory. But Chazelle, for all his reveries of bygone modes of storytelling, knows when to wake his characters up. The film so excels at visualizing the euphoria of a young couple in love — at one point, they’re literally over the moon, soaring amid the cosmos of the Griffith Observatory — that its third-act comedown feels almost like a brave surprise.
As the stardust wears off, and both characters’ dreams fail to materialize, they fight, and the movie no longer feels scripted. A candlelit dinner transforms into an ugly but necessary clearing of the air, as a healthy debate about art, commerce, compromise and purity leads to regrettable personal attacks.
The music, from the Broadway pop and vintage jazz that had given their story such a stirring backbeat, drops away mercilessly. You begin to realize that La La Land’s intentions run deeper than lovingly executed throwback fluff. Even in Chazelle’s microcosm of movie Mayberry, everybody hurts.
LA LA LAND. Director: Damien Chazelle; Cast: Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling, John Legend, Rosemarie DeWitt, J.K. Simmons; Distributor: Summit; Rating: PG-13; Opens: Friday at most area theaters