Enter: La La Land, a musical starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone! Are there more likable A-listers? Honest question because I'm not sure that there are in 2017. Gosling's Sebastian is a struggling jazz pianist with an eye towards the past and Stone's Mia is an aspiring actress who doesn't quite fit in with the typical Hollywood scene.
The Good: I WANT to not like Ryan Gosling, I really do. Especially in this movie. A white dude self-appointed as the guardian of all things jazz? Uhhh, what? He's smug and often seems insincere... but damn it if the guy isn't charming as hell, CONSTANTLY. He won me over within 10 minutes of this film starting. Emma Stone is pretty much constantly and disarmingly sweet and funny and charming as well. She's come a long way since she was Jonah Hill's (what??) love interest in Superbad, guys. This film wasn't what I was expecting, and I mean that in the best possible way. I was expecting it to be an homage-filled throwback to the musicals of classic Hollywood, and while there are parts of that, it's ultimately a creation all its own. Part dissertation on the nature of creativity, part love story, part musical, it's at once heavy and melancholy and whimsical and saccharine. I'm convinced that in the hands of a lesser director this whole endeavor would have collapsed under the weight of its own pretension and ambition, but Chazelle makes it something memorable and all his own. This is the sort of film that Hollywood (and the Academy) absolutely LOVES, as it romanticizes L.A., the arts, movies and their value, but there's plenty here for anyone to love. I like both the fact that the plot is simple enough to sum up in a paragraph but that there's room to defy convention and that Chazelle borrowed from musicals without making his film a slave to the traditional musical structure. The use of flashbacks, dream sequences and musical numbers really lends the film a whimsy and an absurdist, even romantic angle that gives the whole thing a playful feel.
The Bad: ultimately, the film just isn't as smart or as meaningful as it would like you to think it is. There are some absolutely cringeworthy scenes involving a certain band and a certain John Legend that nearly collapse into self-parody. While these issues aren't enough to derail the film, they do ultimately detract from what is otherwise a smartly constructed love letter to the arts.
In the end, this film is absolutely well worth watching, and absolutely one of the year's best. It's a fun, well-crafted, well-acted ride. Gosling and Stone are simply impossible to dislike (well... apart from that one time Cameron Crowe tried to make Emma Stone Asian but that's not entirely her fault...) and their easy chemistry and comfort level with one another makes this film a sweet and often times innocent story of dreams and love and creativity and compromise. It's not the best film of the year (Moonlight or Arrival deserve Best Picture), but it's just the right combination of creative, sweet, smart, fun, whimsical and melancholy to place it firmly among the year's best.
8.5/10
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