Damien Chazelle (2016)

Jazz pianist Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) can’t believe it when would-be actress Mia (Emma Stone) tells him she’s never seen Rebel Without a Cause.  They arrange, as their next date, to go to a screening at a Los Angeles picture house.  Mia is delayed (more of that later) and misses the start but she and Sebastian are both enjoying Rebel when the film breaks down – well, it is an old movie!  Undaunted, the couple drive out to the Griffith Observatory – located on Mount Hollywood, commanding a fine view of downtown LA, and the setting for two famous sequences in Rebel Without a Cause.  In the Observatory’s planetarium, Mia and Sebastian dance and float fantastically into the starry firmament.  This bit in La La Land looks set to become famous in its own right and Damien Chazelle’s ‘Comedy, Drama, Musical’ (the movie’s IMDB categorisation) is already an ante-post favourite for the 2017 Oscars.   The sequence at the Observatory epitomises La La Land, what’s charming critics and festival audiences about it, and why I find the film vexing.

Sebastian and Mia are falling in love, it’s some enchanted evening on Mount Hollywood, why shouldn’t they be literally swept off their feet into a heavenly dance?  Because – in the cine-history world within which La La Land exists (it has no life beyond that world) – this is the wrong place for euphoria.  The first episode at the Observatory in Rebel Without a Cause describes a high-school trip to the planetarium, where James Dean and the other kids hear a lecture from a space scientist:  he calmly but chillingly describes how the Earth will eventually, inevitably die.  (The scientist’s voice is just getting to this when the film of Rebel goes phut in La La Land.)  The second episode is the climax to the movie:  the Sal Mineo character barricades himself inside the Observatory and, when he eventually emerges, is shot dead by the police.  The connotations of the place, as it features in Nicholas Ray’s picture, are, in other words, bleak.  Sebastian in La La Land is, in matters of jazz, nothing if not a purist; as a cinemagoer, he’s evidently less discriminating.  A movie is somewhere you go for a good time and the settings of a ‘classic’ movie – even when unhappy things occur in them – are Elysium.  More often than not, Sebastian is a miserable fellow but silver-screen stardust makes a blithe spirit of him or, at least, turns him to jelly.  Damien Chazelle probably shares his hero’s fond enthusiasm for Hollywood past but Chazelle is also canny and clever:  he knows he’s far from alone and he knows how to work the audience.

It’s refreshing for a picture to come along that demands to be seen on a big cinema screen but isn’t an action or sci-fi blockbuster.  The last (non-animated) hit musical devised directly for the screen was Moulin Rouge! but that, as a jukebox musical, could hardly be termed ‘original’.  Against this background, it’s not surprising that Chazelle’s film is being viewed as a kind of miracle.  Its success will be welcome if it encourages the creation of other musicals; if that does happen, though, it’s to be hoped they amount to more than this formidably assured and artful recycling.  I didn’t try for a ticket for La La Land when booking for this month’s London Film Festival opened:  it was already clear from its reception at Venice and Toronto that the movie was going to be a big deal once it was released (December in the US, January in Britain) – there was nil risk of missing out on it.  Then, on the opening day of the LFF, an email arrived announcing further seats would be available for the upcoming Saturday morning screening at the Leicester Square Odeon.  I decided to apply for a ticket and am not sorry I did:  I didn’t enjoy the experience but it would have been worse seeing La La Land once the awards season is underway and it’s officially all the rage.

Damien Chazelle wrote and directed Whiplash, only his second feature, with scary confidence:  it was only to be expected his confidence would increase in the light of Whiplash‘s success.  In an early scene in La La Land, Mia is in the bathroom of the apartment she shares with several other girls.  She wipes the steam from the bathroom mirror – not casually but in a way that draws attention to what a cute, deft detail Chazelle has devised.  The supply of curlicues like this is relentless; for this viewer, their effect was always distancing and often alienating.   This movie is very explicitly preconceived.  Chazelle has shot the musical numbers using 1950s-style CinemaScope:  in case you don’t notice this – and in order to get the audience immediately into an I-❤-movies frame of mind – the word ‘CinemaScope’ is emblazoned across the screen at the very start of the film.  La La Land is set in the present day and one of Mia’s and Sebastian’s romantic numbers is aborted by a mobile phone ringing.  It’s an apt, even charming, modern touch but Chazelle plays characteristically fast and loose with mobiles to suit his immediate needs.  When the couple’s outing to Rebel Without a Cause turns out to clash with a dinner date Mia had forgotten about and can’t get out of, she’s no more able to make quick contact with Sebastian than her counterpart in a movie musical of half a century ago would have been.  This allows her eventual escape from the restaurant and dash through the streets to the cinema to be staged in the traditional way.  (Later on, Mia, acting and romantic hopes in tatters, has returned to her family home in Boulder City, Nevada.  The phone rings in Sebastian’s LA apartment, where he’s now alone:  it’s a casting agent on the line and she wants to speak to Mia.  The agent asks Sebastian not if Mia has a mobile but to pass on a message if he sees her.  He drives to Boulder City.)

I stayed for only a few minutes of the Q&A that followed the LFF screening.  I hadn’t intended to stay for any of it and was in the gents’ when I heard the gales of cheering and applause that welcomed the ‘surprise guest’ whom Damien Chazelle had promised in his introduction would be joining him on stage once the film was over.  Curiosity – as to which one of Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling had materialised – got the better of me.   (It was Gosling.)  I went back into the auditorium just in time to hear Chazelle explaining how important it was to him for the film to be ‘grounded in real people’.  This is just what La La Land is not:  it’s substantially artificial, intermittently real on the surface.  Mia and Sebastian are required components of a Hollywood price-of-fame story.  This is disguised by some naturalistic acting and a few passages of Chazelle’s dialogue, but you’re always aware of the subterfuge.

Sebastian accepts an offer from an old friend, Keith (John Legend), to join his mainstream jazz combo.  Although he has mixed feelings about going on the road to play a type of music he doesn’t believe in, Sebastian soon finds himself earning money as he’s never done before.  He takes a one-night break from touring and comes back to LA to prepare a surprise romantic supper for Mia:  the well-written, well-played argument between them that overwhelms the occasion introduces a welcome asperity to proceedings for a few minutes.  The argument is one of the stations of the cross in this type of story, nevertheless – so too, later on, is Mia’s crucial audition, which will transform her immediately from nobody to major film actress.  The film’s catchy title perfectly captures both its geographical and its world-of-make-believe settings; and the counter to some of my objections to La La Land will be that it’s a ‘fairytale’.  But that doesn’t square with Chazelle’s professed determination to make a movie ‘grounded in real people’ – and, when he makes this claim, he’s well aware of what his leads bring to the party.

Many of the audience for the LFF screening of La La Land looked to be in their twenties and the youthfulness of the main contributors to the film could be important in ensuring it’s a hit with this age group.  Damien Chazelle is thirty-one; Ryan Gosling, although he’s been a star for nearly a decade now, is still only in his mid-thirties; Emma Stone is twenty-seven.  For plenty of people, the modernity of the two stars – in terms of their public personas and their acting styles – will be enough to give their characters contemporary credibility.  Stone, who is being tipped for the Best Actress Oscar for her performance, is endlessly capable and likeably resourceful.  She’s especially strong in Mia’s audition sequences (there are several) and Chazelle really showcases the one that will change Mia’s life.  Ryan Gosling’s air of arrogant dissatisfaction gives Sebastian’s early scenes a semblance of grit.  His flair for comedy serves him well in sequences like the one in which Sebastian is resentfully plinking out a medley of Christmas favourites on the piano. On the whole, though, Gosling’s and Stone’s acting turns out to be perfectly attuned to the spirit of La La Land:  highly accomplished yet synthetic.  Except for Mia and Sebastian, characters tend to be dispensed with once they’ve served their often one-scene purpose. (The film seems much more indifferent to minor characters than the musicals on which it draws.)  J K Simmons has an honorary cameo as the manager of the bar where Sebastian plays the Christmas medley.  Rosemarie DeWitt is wasted as the hero’s sister.

The dichotomy that La La Land presents between authentic and adulterated jazz – between Sebastian’s artistic idealism and Keith’s hollow commercialism – also struck me as phony.  (It reminded me of Richard Brody’s contempt for Damien Chazelle’s definition of echt jazz drumming in Whiplash:  ‘The protagonist, Andrew Neiman, [is] nineteen and idolizes Buddy Rich.  Buddy Rich?  A loud and insensitive technical whiz, a TV personality, not a major jazz inspiration …’)  The ‘bad’ jazz played by Keith’s combo didn’t sound to me like jazz at all:  I actually quite liked it.  (Not as much, though, as a supposedly hopeless rendition of A-ha’s ‘Take on Me’, early in the film, by a band hired to provide the entertainment at a Hollywood poolside party – with Sebastian on keyboards.)  The tolerability to me of Keith’s music made me wonder if the ‘good’ (boring) jazz Sebastian plays might actually be ‘bad’ to jazz aficionados.  The best of the original songs composed for the film by Justin Hurwitz achieve, through repetition, a thin wistfulness.

The film comprises five sections.  The first four are consecutive seasons, from winter one year to autumn the next. The final section is winter five years later. Mia:  now an international movie star, makes a trip back to LA with her (non-Sebastian) husband and infant daughter.  A traffic jam, a brief echo of the one that supplies La La Land ‘s bombastic and gruesome opening number, prevents her getting to a film premiere.  She and her husband decide to get a drink and have dinner instead and find themselves in the crepuscular basement of ‘Seb’s’, the jazz bar that Sebastian always longed for:  the sign on the entrance has the logo that Mia designed for the club of his dreams when dreams were all the couple had.  As he takes to the stage, Sebastian catches sight of Mia in the audience.  It’s only their eyes that meet but this is enough to generate a pyrotechnical what-might-have-been episode:  a high-speed summary of the relationship that could have developed if one of their first brief encounters had gone differently.  Then ‘reality’ resumes; Mia walks out of the club and Sebastian’s life forever.  Both have got what they wanted professionally but not the person they love.  (In order to make the position emphatically clear, Mia has married a pointlessly handsome suit (Tom Everett Scott).)

There’s a potentially interesting element to the love story:  what happens when a relationship, dependent in large part on a couple’s assumption that they’ll continue to be frustrated in their ambitions, is threatened by unexpected success?  Damien Chazelle chooses not to explore this theme, however.  Success is merely useful to him as a device for driving the lovers apart: first when Sebastian is on the road with Keith’s combo while Mia is preparing her one-woman stage show that hardly anyone goes to see (except for a big-time talent-spotter); then once Mia goes to shoot a movie in Paris.  The endless touring with the band that causes the dinner-table showdown between Sebastian and Mia comes to an abrupt end – he’s around to take the crucial phone call from the agent, to travel to Boulder City on consecutive days, etc.  As soon as there’s a sniff of instant fame for Mia in the air, Sebastian is ready to revert to playing the kind of pure, uncommercial music he really wants to play.  He, in effect, passes the baton of success to Mia – so that it can continue getting in the way of their happiness together.

The ending of La La Land isn’t the only thing in it that recalls Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977).  Rooted, like Chazelle’s film, in love for both the physical reality and the mythology of the city of the title, New York, New York charted the relationship between an obsessive, avant-garde tenor-sax player (Robert De Niro) and a popular big-band singer (Liza Minnelli).  Scorsese set out to juxtapose, and explore the tensions between, the stylised features of movie musicals of the period in which he set his story (it begins on V-J Day) and what Pauline Kael called the ‘dark side that was left out of the old cliché plots’.  The latter aspect took the form of an ‘improvisational, Cassavetes-like psychodrama … between the stars’ (Kael again).  Although New York, New York went wrong, Scorsese’s passionate struggle to bring the conflicting elements of the piece to life was admirable and the contrasts between De Niro and Minnelli were fascinating:  their presences and performing styles reflected both the musical idioms at odds with each other in the story and the incompatibility of the protagonists in marriage.

New York, New York’s serious attempt to dramatise the complexities of success in the world of popular music and cinema of the era in which it was set is light years away from La La Land.  The Wikipedia article on the latter seems right enough in citing as main inspirations two screen musicals from the 1960s:  Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort.  The article seems righter still when it goes on to say ‘especially the latter’.  While The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is individual and charming, The Young Girls of Rochefort purports to be a homage to Hollywood musicals:  the casting of Gene Kelly in a key role was designed to prove what Demy was after but the resulting movie was both flimsy and flabby.   Damien Chazelle’s film – a homage to a homage that was inauthentic in the first place – is an altogether sharper piece of work than Jacques Demy’s but the thoroughgoing tricksiness of La La Land makes it less entrancing than enraging.

8 October 2016