A bright, colourful and tragic ode to
all that is vulnerable in us. Why do we dream? What makes us hold on to some
dreams and give up on others? What makes some of us reach for the stars even
when our feet seem to be encased in concrete? Can you be happy in failure or at
best, content? Can you be devastated in success or will your heart achieve a
compromise with your head with the passage of imperceptible little slivers of
time?
La
La Land pays obvious
homage to the big-budget musicals of the MGM era and to the golden age of Jazz.
Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone try, with varying levels of
success, to emulate Fred & Ginger, and for brief flashes, they do. Emma
Stone's Mia Dolan is tragically
real, vulnerable and beautiful, a word I use with zero reference to Miss Stone's
physical appearance. Ryan Gosling’s Sebastian
whines as a true jazz aficionado should, an inversion of the trope which
normally would have his character be the female protagonist.
But what La La Land really calls to
mind is the sadness of creativity. To wish, to want, to dream, to create is a calling, and not a career
and in that lies its unlimited potential and its heart-breaking tragedy. The
fact that for most of them—the poets, the artists, the songwriters, the
singers, the authors—their art...our
art, is shouting into a silent, cruel void. That success will be defined by the
outside world, that personal relationships will never be for us as they are for
others, that in the end, even happy endings are fleeting, a single possible
scenario that will be tinged with the sadness of those foregone.
I seem to have lost the temperament
to remember songs anymore and though I liked much of La La Land's soundtrack as
it played on screen, I don't know that I could recall any of it a week from
now. Which is not to say it is not good—it is. Justin Huritz does a fantastic job of the original songs and the
camerawork and cinematography is striking even to a philistine like myself.
As the final scene draws to a
conclusion, as Mia and Seb exchange a ghost of a smile, I could sense that Damian Chazelle was giving that knowing smile to us. To each and every one of
us in the viewing audience, whether in grimy theatres or in cozy sofas at home,
he was saying,
“I know. This is you, and this is me.”
And that, ultimately, is La La Land.
It’s the Hollywood of ‘Top Hat’ and ‘Singing In the Rain’, of Gentlemen Prefer
Blondes’ and ‘Sunset Boulevard’, of bright boys and manic pixie dream girls. Is
it trivial? Perhaps.
But it is enough. It is enough for us
dreamers.
