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A12 | Friday, December 9, 2016
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
NY
LIFE&ARTS
FILM REVIEW | Joe Morgenstern
That’s Entertainment
“LA LA LAND” IS a crowd-pleaser if ever
there was one, and I couldn’t be more
pleased to be part of the crowd. Damien
Chazelle’s musical, consistently daring and
occasionally sublime, does what the movies
have all but forgotten how to do—sweep us
up into a dream of love that’s enhanced in
an urgent present by the mythic power of
Hollywood’s past.
The lovers are Mia, an aspiring actress
and practicing barista, and Sebastian, a
struggling jazz pianist who is dedicated,
however precariously, to helping keep jazz
alive; they’re played, respectively and superlatively, by Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling.
Both Mia and Seb are enchanted by the
past. She works in a coffee shop on the
Warner Brothers lot within sight of the
movie-set window, she tells him, that Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman looked
out of in “Casablanca.” He owns a piano
stool that Hoagy Carmichael once sat on,
and treats it like a shrine.
Mr. Chazelle finds the past enchanting
too, but he uses it astutely without becoming its prisoner. It’s as if he’d summoned up
everything he loves from the golden age of
movie musicals—including the sweet clichés—and hit a refresh button. The result,
untainted by sentiment or irony, is a bittersweet love story told through exuberant
dance, lovely music (by Justin Hurwitz, with
lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul), exquisite lighting and fantastical colors (the cinematographer, Linus Sandgren, shot on
35mm film in CinemaScope), and a succession of tender, funny or heart-stopping encounters between two captivating dreamers.
The opening number, “Another Day of
Sun,” sets a high bar for audacity. Gridlock
has struck an L.A. freeway on-ramp; it’s the
worst traffic jam seen on the big screen
since Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 “Weekend.”
(It’s also a feat of technical virtuosity; the
sequence takes place on a real freeway ramp
while real traffic flows nearby in real time.)
The camera moves past motionless cars and
frustrated drivers rocking in rhythm to a
Babel of music on their car radios. One of
them, a pretty woman in a yellow dress,
starts singing a song of her own, then gets
out of her car and, before you can say Debbie Reynolds or Cyd Charisse, dances a
dance that turns into a contagion. Soon the
on-ramp becomes a serpentine stage for a
chorus line of drivers and passengers who
do backflips on the pavement and sing out
from the rooftops of their cars.
The most conspicuous holdouts from this
euphoria are Sebastian and Mia. He sits in his
1980s Buick convertible, listening to boppish
piano riffs on the car’s cassette player. She’s
in her Prius, directly in front of him, chattering on her phone. When traffic finally starts
to move she’s too distracted to notice, so he
gives her a blast on his horn and she flips
him the bird. Their next encounter, one of
those fateful accidents without which there’d
be no plot, doesn’t go much more smoothly.
When they come together a third time,
though, it’s on a luminous night in Griffith
Park overlooking the lights of the San Fernando Valley, and they re-enact, without realizing it—their innocence being part of
LIONSGATE
Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling star in ‘La La Land,’ a joyous musical that evokes Hollywood’s golden age
Emma Stone plays Mia, an aspiring actress, and Ryan Gosling plays Sebastian, a struggling jazz pianist, in Damien Chazelle’s latest film.
their charm—one of those classic scenes in
which Fred and Ginger keep resisting each
other until, irresistibly, they sing, they
dance and they fall in love. (Another re-enactment, quite intentional on Mia’s part, involves a celebrated scene from “Rebel Without a Cause” and leads to a surreally
beautiful sequence in the Griffith Observatory planetarium.)
A word of proportion, rather than caution, about these musical numbers. This is
not the golden age of Hollywood, in case
you hadn’t noticed. “La La Land” was not
produced with the prodigious resources of
MGM at its zenith, and the movie’s co-stars,
far from being larger-than-life icons, are
very much of this time. Their dancing is
more endearing than dazzling. Their singing
stirs the heart without shaking the rafters.
If they were more polished they’d be less
appealing to today’s moviegoers.
That said, however, Ms. Stone summons
up a plenty-good-enough voice that carries
breathy echoes of Audrey Hepburn in
“Funny Face” or Catherine Deneuve in “The
Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” and she combines
it with startling fervor in Mia’s climactic audition, the effect of which is stunning. Mr.
Gosling’s performance is understated, with a
tinge of touching earnestness, but it’s also
witty and commandingly smart. What’s
more, he does Seb’s fluent piano playing
without benefit of doubles on screen or on
the sound track, an achievement I found astonishing. The two had a terrific bedroom
scene together in “Crazy, Stupid, Love.”
Here, with Mr. Chazelle directing from his
own screenplay, they’re perfection from
start to finish. (John Legend is impressive
as a musician who seduces Sebastian with
commercial success in a subplot that spills a
bit of air from the narrative’s sails.)
Jazz figured crucially in Mr. Chazelle’s
previous feature, “Whiplash,” a story of a
young drummer obsessed with perfection
and the ruthless teacher who pushes him to
the breaking point. Still, there was nothing
in that tightly wound film to predict the lyrical, breakout looseness of this one. Go
back, however, to “Guy and Madeline on a
Park Bench,” the filmmaker’s gritty 2009 debut feature, and a lot of “La La Land” is
there in microbudget, black-and-white incipience: strong music by Mr. Hurwitz; a jazz
musician hero (a trumpeter in this instance); a heroine who sings stream-of-consciousness songs on public streets and
launches into a spontaneous song-and-tapdance routine set in a restaurant. What isn’t
there, of course, is Mr. Chazelle’s spectacular growth as an artist during the past few
years, and a pair of movie stars, each of
them peerless in their own way, who’ve
brought his buoyant vision to fruition.
So how will that vision play to contemporary audiences, and especially to young
moviegoers, with their supposed resistance
to a genre in which people burst into song
and dance for no logical reason? I seldom
try to second-guess box-office prospects,
but I’m hoping that “La La Land” will be a
hit for the ages, for all ages. It’s a film that
re-enacts, with rare originality, a classic role
for the movie medium—escapist entertainment in troubled times.
 For more review coverage including web
exclusives visit WSJ.com/arts.
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