Review: La La Land
As I write this, the Oscars are just a few days away. Every year, it seems as if there’s one movie in particular that generates a ton of buzz every season, and is favored to win awards. This year, Damien Chazelle’s La La Land is the rumored Oscar darling, and after seeing it, I can completely understand why.
La La Land, starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, is a harrowing thriller about the dangers of obsession. Emma Stone plays Mia, a young girl who moves to the big city to become an actress. In a chance encounter, she meets Sebastian, played by Ryan Gosling, a quirky and alluring young man who works as an online music reviewer. Sebastian is a good writer, but his stubborn personality and his frequent outbursts of violent anger cost him his job at the publication he works for. Sebastian is obsessed with jazz, and while his jazz knowledge is indeed impressive, it also isolates him from others. No one understands the artform as much as he does. Nevertheless, Mia is deeply attracted to Sebastian’s tortured soul and his thorough knowledge of jazz, and the two enter into a very passionate relationship.
Over time, however, cracks in their relationship begin to appear. Sebastian attempts to teach his lover to “understand” jazz, but is unable to. Mia tries her best, but with every Miles Davis and John Coltrane record he plays for her, Sebastian’s frustration with her only grows deeper. This culminates in a disturbing scene in which he threatens Mia with a pocket recorder flute, growling “you fucking stupid idiot. How come you don’t get jazz? I should fill up this pocket recorder flute with poison, and I’d play it, and we’d both inhale the poison and die.” If for nothing else, Gosling deserves the Best Actor award for the way he inhabits the role of a tortured, violent young music aficionado, elevating the scene from something merely tense to something that would not be out of place in a horror film.
After this, of course, Mia and Sebastian break up, with Sebastian’s inner turmoil growing immensely. We see him sitting forlornly in his dirty apartment, listening to “Bitches Brew” on a loop. We also see Mia, deeply traumatized by her ordeal, throwing herself into her work to try to heal. 2 months later, Sebastian, driven to a dark place by his loneliness, sees a review online of a “Blue Note” release and flies into a rage. He is arrested after calling in a bomb threat to the Pitchfork offices and is sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Sebastian grows even worse in jail, as there is no jazz there for him to listen to. After a month, he can stand it no more and breaks out of jail in a dizzying, visually stunning action sequence. His only goal is to find Mia, and try one final time to help her understand jazz.
In the final scene in the film, Sebastian breaks into Mia’s apartment with a copy of Ornette Coleman’s “The Shape of Jazz to Come” and his trusty record player, desperate for one last chance at making a human connection. The final confrontation between Mia and Sebastian is at once harrowing, compelling and deeply cathartic, and Mia finally rejects Sebastian once and for all, frantically running out of her house and calling the police. Sebastian is distraught, realizing that he destroyed a relationship with the only person who ever truly loved him. he stumbles out of Mia’s apartment in a haze, and, in a tragic scene, is shot to death by police officers as he goes to pull his recorder flute out of his pocket.
La La Land is without a doubt one of the most moving films to come out this year, and is a thrilling meditation on life, love, and the way our demons can break us. I give it 5 stars out of 5.
