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As A Musical, 'La La Land' Doesn’t Sing Or Dance

Lionsgate

With the exception of Cabaret, which is about the rise of the Nazis in Berlin, the new film La La Land may be the most doleful musical I’ve seen, and it doesn’t have the excuse of history’s greatest trauma. It’s a pleasant but lonely film that puts together two characters who don’t fit well. They’re unhappy people who have a romance of sorts. Sebastian, Ryan Gosling, a pianist, dreams of running a great jazz club while he plays lifeless pop Christmas songs in a restaurant. Mia (Emma Stone) hopes to become a Hollywood actress. Now, though, she’s stuck in a spiral of auditions which lead only to rude rejections.

La La Land starts well enough. A traffic jam on a Los Angeles freeway leads to people hopping out of their cars to join in a lively production number of song and dance. At the end, Sebastian honks his horn too loudly for Mia who responds by giving him the finger. It’s love.

Credit Lionsgate

But the major problem shows up quickly – the film has no direction. The two characters aren’t going anywhere and neither is the story. Musicals don’t have a history of rich stories to tell, but they do go somewhere. Sometimes the characters want to put on a show; sometimes they want to get married. In Meet Me in St. Louis, one of the greatest movie musicals, the questions are change and male power – whether the family will have to leave their gracious life in St. Louis and move to New York, as the father has decided. Astaire and Rogers want to get married and dance together. It’s not much, but it pulls the film along in a sprightly way to its conclusion.

Mia and Sebastian mostly moon about. They don’t dance or sing very much, and they’re not terrific singers or dancers anyway. That’s ok because Stone and Gosling are both engaging performers and they’re game. But their limitations thwart the genius of great musicals – which is that the music, the songs and the dances are complex and rich. In Swing Time, the evolving, emotionally rocky relationship between Rogers and Astaire plays out in metaphorically articulate and thrilling dances and songs. The musical numbers in La La Land are artistically stunted. They can’t deepen the story or the romance. It’s enjoyable and amusing that they dance; the opening number is nice – it just has no texture. And if you think that musicals are typically inconsequential, take a look at The Pirate, The Band Wagon or Cabaret, or even the frothy 1934 The Merry Widow, which is about the very nature of love. And that is not frivolous.

La La Land makes no reason for Mia and Sebastian to fall for one another – or even more, to go on and on about it. It’s interesting that they’re both independent sorts – each has a very contemporary sense of career path. That might be a good subject for the movie to explore – and sing and dance about. But the movie still needs to do more than just say Mia and Sebastian like each other. Something has to make the audience feel it deeply enough to make us hope the two work it out somehow. They have to be able to sing and dance together in songs and dances that matter.

It seems an odd choice that director Damian Chazelle films the two leads separately much of the time. If they don’t appear together, the audience won’t believe that they go together. Long one person close-ups of them looking unhappy simply underline their separation.

La La Land quotes other musicals, and the comparisons don’t help. The end of the picture takes a good five minutes to show the situation between the pair. It comes right out of Jacques Demy’s 1964 musical, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. But Demy gets the whole ball of wax in one shot that leaves you devastated – and thrilled to be with the film. La La Land just ends.

Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages. In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.
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