Welcome to another cinemensational edition of The Film Room with Chris Corbellini. This week’s film: La La Land, a musical with the City of Angels as not only the backdrop, but the supporting cast.
La La Land
by Chris Corbellini
****
Three years ago, almost to the day, I made a late-night drive back to my Santa Monica sublet when, still a little burned-out from my gig in showbiz, I stopped at a light on Lincoln Boulevard and spotted a musician seated in a darkened bus stop. He was alone, with no audience to speak of, yet singing and strumming his guitar as if he were performing at the Hollywood Bowl. This is LA, I thought. A city of dreamers.
I was about to roll down my window to listen when the light turned green, and I was off to my own day-to-day distractions. I was a TV producer who might have some work for a good (and cheap) guitarist. Oh well. As I write this I still have no idea whether he was any good. This is also LA: a city of risk, missed chances, pipe dreams and broken hearts. Even if you have talent – and there’s talent in every corner and bus stop in LA — there’s also a good chance that your talent won’t be discovered. Your voice will never truly be appreciated. It never happens.
I thought of this throughout every song and dance of LA LA LAND, a mostly sunny, crowd-pleasing musical about chasing big dreams before reaching its karmic destination of what sacrifices you must make to have those dreams come true.
And when I say sunny, I mean literally. The movie kicks off with a swath of bright blue sky before revealing local folks stuck in bumper-to-bumper on what looked like the (dreaded) 405 freeway. The camera then discovers a woman in a yellow dress … and we are off into the first musical number about how sun-splashed the city is, traffic or not. It’s an impressive open, well choreographed and lensed with precision and verve. I saw two edits throughout the sequence, at the most, with the camera darting up and down, left and right, setting up the next iso dance moment. It reminded me of the opening tracking shot of BOOGIE NIGHTS, practically elbowing a theatergoer to let them know this is going to be a good time. In LA LA LAND’s open, you do feel the vibe but don’t see the headliners until the finish line, when one flips off the other. So much for playful. The happy-joy mood is hijacked by two struggling artists neck-deep in Hollywood, jaded but still hustling and in it to win it.
This is Mia (Emma Stone) and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), the former an aspiring actress grinding through soul-dismembering auditions and grinding your coffee beans as a barista on the lot; the latter a talented jazz musician who wants to open a club in a hot spot. We’ve seen these archetypes before: Mia probably stepped off the metaphorical bus to Hollywood with a suitcase and a smile a year earlier, and will remain optimistic and unsinkable until it’s thunderously beaten out of her. Sebastian is probably from the area, more knowing about the business, and too proud to play music he doesn’t like for the bucks … until he’s not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvWhKWhFWoc
Both of them are passionate artists, destined to get together, but while Mia made the choice to give LA a go, for Sebastian, it wasn’t a choice. There was no choice to make. Music is an extension of his being, something the film elegantly points out by darkening a half-empty restaurant and bathing Gosling in light at a piano. The look the makeup artist and the entire movie is going for with Gosling is James Dean, hair tussled just so. Still, that introduction of Sebastian as artist reminded me of a Technicolor version of Bob Dylan on stage in DON’T LOOK BACK. Just him, the light, and the instrument. He’s not going anywhere. There’s no other place he’d rather be.
And what’s the reward for Sebastian’s performance? He’s fired, on Christmas no less, and then angrily brushes past Mia, who was floored by the effort.
They meet again, of course, (“It’s pretty strange that we keep running into each other,” she says) and on what looked like Mulholland Drive, high up in the hills, they begin to fall for one other. That exchange, and several others were shot at magic hour — i.e. right before the sunset when the lighting is ideal and reddened around the edges. A later pier scene also comes to mind, when Sebastian briefly dances with a man’s wife, to the chagrin of the husband. One of the notable exceptions is inside Griffith Observatory (the setting of Dean’s REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE), when under cover of a starry night, the two dreamers are in love.
Amidst all this plot and cinematography talk, did I mention LA LA LAND is a musical? It couldn’t be anything else. The middle of the film moves along swimmingly, buoyed by the music — they become a couple, she works on her play, he gets a well-paying gig – until decisions need to be made. He accepts a job in the music industry to show her he cares enough to be a provider, but now that he’s on tour he doesn’t have the time to see her. And what if her play doesn’t work out? Does she get back on that metaphorical bus?
The third act is something special and while I won’t spoil any part of it, Stone really stands out. It’s not hard to envision drama majors and young girls who love the stage being inspired by it, and by the musical numbers in general. The role is indeed the dream of any actress, working or not, famous or anonymous. And I’d like to see the two of them dancing together one more time on Oscar night, celebrated by Hollywood for making a film that celebrates the old-fashioned ideals of Hollywood.
But the endgame and the happy endings of LA LA LAND also provide a cautionary tale — for a jazzman, for an actress, or for that guitarist on a dark street. In showbiz, when the money is finally there, professional and personal lives are rarely in harmony and never perfect. Especially when fame comes into play. Welcome to LA.
