Trust me, La La Land will win the Golden Globe for Best Picture – Comedy or Musical and will be one of the favorites (certainly it is my very favorite so far) for the Best Picture Oscar. I expect Damien Chazelle to be nominated for Best Director and Original Screenplay. You can see it at the end of next week. Plan your weekend around it.
La La Land (Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, J.K. Simmons) –Once in a blue moon, a movie comes along that transcends convention and transforms the audience. For me, La La Land just mesmerized me. It is my favorite non-drama in a decade. Not one to gush over films, I am officially erupting over Damien Chazelle’s original, creative, spectacular romantic musical comedy.
From the first scene (the overture) on a congested on-ramp of the freeway to the closing smiles in the jazz club, La La Land plows new ground in the oldest of genres: the romantic comedy and classic movie musical. Sixty years ago, this would have been a Gene Kelly/Cyd Charisse vehicle. Twenty years ago, it would have starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. In 2016, this is Hanks/Ryan if they could sing and dance like Kelly/Charisse with the modern dash of John Legend. Intrigued?
Two of the screen’s most likable young actors, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, star as an aspiring jazz musician and would-be actress respectively. Both are good; neither is great. Both are struggling. He is playing Christmas carols on a piano at a restaurant (owned by a character played by J.K. Simmons) while dreaming of starting his own old-fashioned jazz club; she is a barista hoping for stardom but auditioning unsuccessfully. Then they meet and the electricity sparks. That is pretty standard rom-com stuff right up to the magical musical numbers. They dance, they float, they sparkle. Snow flies, lights flicker.
He joins an up-and-coming band led by an old classmate (John Legend) and hits the road. She writes a one-woman play, rents a theater and stages it herself. Their lives diverge.
Every time La La Land gets too predictable, director Damien Chazelle twists it, adds a tune, and surprises us. It is hard to believe that three years ago Chazelle couldn’t get the money to produce his little story about a young drummer trying to succeed at a prestigious music school under a tyrannical, abusive teacher. He turned that into a short film called Whiplash starring the aforementioned J.K. Simmons. The rest is film legend as the short’s success at the Sundance Film Festival led to an Academy Award nominated feature film by the same name starring Miles Teller and Simmons, who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. With that success behind him, producers lined up with money for his next film. Based on a senior thesis he wrote with his Harvard classmate, Justin Hurwitz )who wrote all of the music), Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench would be an odd-ball, throw-back, magically mystical musical, which evolved into La La Land.
Chazelle may just be a cinematic genius. This old-school musical set in a modern day world where romanticism seems dead is at once a perfect antidote to today’s political climate and a coda to our desire for a return to a simpler time.
Chazelle makes every right decision with this film. His stars are not great singers and dancers just as their characters aren’t great musicians or actors. The songs and dances are cute and fun (like Hairspray), not intricate and balletic. The plot is formulaic but the outcome is … well … I’ll let you watch and enjoy.
Mark your calendar now: Friday, December 16. That is the day this film opens nationwide. Get in line now! I will be seeing this again, and I almost never see movies twice in the theater.
P.S. One couple we met as they were leaving the screening thought this was a terrible film. I pity them. They just don’t get it. For those people who don’t like rom-coms, musicals, or both, don’t see it. I pity you, too.