Review: La La Land

Set over five seasons, Ryan Gosling is an aspiring jazz club owner currently making a living playing 80s covers in a party band and soullessly playing Christmas carols on piano at a swanky restaurant. Emma Stone plays an aspiring actress, who is similarly just getting by right now. They meet, they fall in love, and it’s not entirely smooth but there is still the music.

It’s well established by now that, with a few exceptions, I don’t like musicals. I like them even less when the people doing the singing are not good singers (Case in point, Woody Allen’s incredibly awkward “Everyone Says I Love You”). I also can’t much take to Emma Stone on screen. This 2016 flick from writer-director Damien Chazelle (whose debut was the well-received but slightly overrated “Whiplash”) has all of this working against it even before it starts. The good news is you’ll probably love it, especially since I too enjoyed it enough to give it at least a soft recommendation. I have my issues with it, it wasn’t made for me, but…I actually didn’t hate this at all. I’m as shocked as you are.

It starts well. Even with the rather average singing, the opening number in busy L.A. traffic is pretty close to brilliant and infectious as hell. I may not understand why people burst out into song in daily life, but I get why I’m the weird one, it’s a fun number and the look of the film is pretty close to Technicolour in spirit at least. It’s a colourful, genuinely funny number and you almost want to applaud by the end of it. The film isn’t exactly downhill from there, but it’s definitely the highlight. The second number about hob-nobbing and social-climbing is cute, and all the songs (aside from Gosling and Stone’s first number together, perhaps) in fact are well-written, if not well-sung. At all. Well, aside from John Legend’s song. Yes, it sounds more Soul than Jazz, but if the film were full of more songs like this sung by people who can genuinely sing, it’d be stronger.

I really don’t get the casting of Ryan Gosling and especially Emma Stone in this. Gosling ends up sorta working in the lead role, even though he should never be allowed anywhere near a musical again. Dude can’t sing, though he has his tolerable moments when singing in a lower register. Still, he is convincing as a jazz enthusiast at least, and only a truly churlish person completely missing the damn point would lament the fact that this is an ode to jazz as told by white people. Yes, it’s an actual complaint I’ve read and it’s idiotic, or at least myopic. This isn’t cultural appropriation, or at least it’s too late to be crying that given how many white jazz musicians there have been. Wanna tell Harry Connick Jr. to stop? No, didn’t think so. Ditto any other white jazz musician throughout history, for those of you snarky enough to suggest Mr. Connick isn’t jazz enough for you (Yeah, I’m pre-empting you, just in case). The scene where Gosling (or Chazelle through Gosling) explains jazz to Stone, is one of the film’s best.

No, for me Emma Stone is the greater problem of the two leads. In addition to not being able to sing, Emma Stone looks completely out-of-place and embarrassed to be there. Despite apparently having done “Cabaret” on stage, Stone can’t sing well and sings like she knows she can’t sing well. That may sound nonsensical, but watch the film and you’ll see what I mean. She’s actually been completely miscast here, because she has the exact wrong screen presence for a musical. She’s a naturally snarky, sarcastic, and cynical modern presence in a film that, while set in modern times, is not often cynical (there’s a couple of jabs at modern L.A. here and there but very few), never needed to be snarky, or sarcastic. Yeah, I can see how some might think it would be the right choice for her sometimes frustrated character, but it’s the wrong choice for this specific genre and the tone it otherwise has (at least until the final third when it gets a little darker for a bit). So I don’t think it was the right casting choice after all, as the mixture of modern and Golden Age musical doesn’t really gel very comfortably. She’s also always ‘on’, constantly trying to be funny, instead of actually being funny. There’s a difference and it separates the greats from the hacks. Then again, she won the bloody Oscar so what do I know? Gosling is as smug as usual, but it’s much, much less of a problem. His presence doesn’t aggravate me nearly enough to work against the film, and he convinces well enough as a jazz-loving pianist. Although Gosling and Stone seem to have a bit of chemistry as actors (having worked together twice before helps), you just can’t figure out what Gosling’s character sees in Stone. The character she plays isn’t overly likeable, the actress doesn’t project likeability in the slightest (aside from Woody Allen’s “Magic in the Moonlight”), and there’s nothing in her character that suggests she would be a good match for Gosling’s character. I’d feel that way even if the role were played by Anna Kendrick, Amy Adams, or Janelle Monae.

Still, even with Stone throwing the frothy tone off and irritating me even more than in “Easy A”, and my lack of enthusiasm for musicals, there’s enjoyment to be had here. The piano-playing sounded good to my novice ears, J.K. Simmons has a fun small role as a humourless and impatient restaurant owner, and the film is surprisingly funny. There’s a cute gag where everyone at a party in L.A. is driving a Prius, and because all the car keys are left in one place (why, I have no idea), it’s difficult for people to find their keys at the end of the night. Even funnier is the discovery that Gosling’s character moonlights as part of a party band playing keyboards on some really shitty 80s covers like A-Ha’s earworm ‘Take on Me’. The kicker is when they perform Flock of Seagull’s ‘I Ran’ and Gosling uses pretty much the same amount of fingers as Mike Score does in the iconic music video.

On the negative side, the final 30 minutes are choppy, episodic and not terribly satisfying on the relationship front. It’s not for the reason you’ll think, either. It just isn’t handled well, and the ending is especially dumb. While the mixture of old and new doesn’t 100% work for me, but there’s lovely little moments like the bit where they float among the stars. That’s just gorgeous, even if I appreciate the dancing and the music more than the singing. I do tend to find jazz a bit loud, but you can’t deny it’s pretty infectious here. As I said earlier, the film is good-looking and colourful. One use of “Vertigo” green at one point is truly gorgeous in particular (Crucially, the film was shot on film, a rarity these days).

A really cool-looking film with an obvious love and appreciation for jazz that even I was able to mildly enjoy. However, when neither of your leads can sing and one of them is miscast and annoying, entertainment value for me was always going to be a bit limited. I think you’ll all enjoy this movie a lot more than I did. Still, I was able to appreciate it somewhat as most of the songs are good (and survive the people singing them) and unlike a lot of musicals, the story pretty much works too.

Rating: B-