At what point should one stop following their dream? At what point is it okay to cast aside one's artistic principles and how are they related to the connexions we form with other people? These are the ideas underlying the action of 2016's La La Land, a sweetly nostalgic Hollywood musical starring a very sweet Emma Stone and a smouldering-as-always Ryan Gosling. They play two dreamers trying to make it in the entertainment industry, she as an actress and he as a jazz musician. It's a colourful film with decent songs and a sweet tribute to old Hollywood.
Stone plays Mia, a barista with dreams of stardom. She has a massive poster of Ingrid Bergman on her bedroom wall and Bergman's two best films, Notorious and Casablanca, are referenced a few times during the movie. The film itself, though, is much closer in tone and style to Singin' in the Rain or An American in Paris with big peppy or dreamy musical numbers.
Ryan Gosling plays Seb, a devoutly serious jazz pianist whose reverence for the great bop artists of the fifties and sixties causes him trouble in a town that doesn't much care for that old noise. It's an interesting choice of focus for him because bop was almost the antithesis of the kind of Hollywood musical this film is a tribute to. Throughout the film we see him returning to a pretty melody he's been working on for years that doesn't have much of a bop feel either. But he does take Mia to a jazz club and accurately describes the kind of improvisation inherent to bop, then on display by the musicians on the stage.
The romance between the two happily embraces familiar beats of the romantic comedy or musical genres. There are two instances where the pair make a crucial date only for one of them to realise they'd forgotten an important prior engagement and for some reason can't call or text the other person about it. The first of these instances is when Mia is supposed to meet Seb for a screening of Rebel Without a Cause, a sequence which ends with a nice musical number at the Griffith Planetarium. Again, the tone couldn't be further from the film referenced. The lighthearted meet-cute somehow circles adoringly around Nicolas Ray's drama about misfit youth in a time of distablised family dynamics. But it helps serve an ongoing dilemma in La La Land about artistic integrity.
John Legend gamely plays a lousy, Dave Matthewsian pop/folk/jazz/muzak star. Seb reluctantly takes a job as his keyboardist after he overhears Mia on the phone with her mother who's shaming her for being with a guy of no financial prospects. Mia, meanwhile, contemplates throwing in the towel when her one woman show draws a thin audience.
It's only just enough conflict to serve the decent, unambitious, pretty romance. Both Gosling and Mia wear terrific outfits and he gets a lot of mileage out of spectator shoes. I particularly liked a black and tan getup he wears at the planetarium.
It's not hard to see how this film almost won best picture. Hollywood loves stories about Hollywood and this one is unreserved in its affection. Despite a lightly bittersweet ending, it's an innocent delight. It is refreshing at this point, though, to see a movie that says art is worth being passionate about. It's not Lust for Life, Yume, or The Red Shoes but it's not bad.
La La Land is available on Netflix in Japan.
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