Trouble in La La Land
Warning: this article contains spoilers
So Damien Chazelle’s La La Land has finally landed in UK cinemas. It comes at you loaded with an arsenal of charm, a bucketful of awards and practically dares you not to fall in love with it. It features fairly considerable box-office heft in the combination of Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone as lovers Sebastian and Mia — the on-screen couple you love to love. It has a rich orchestral score courtesy of Justin Hurwitz, original songs about stars and love and things, and a production design that will make you swoon in nostalgia. I’m being facetious for a reason here because there is a massive BUT to all of La La Land’s considerable success and all that talk about it being this generation’s Casablanca.
Let’s start with the positives. Technically, the film works. No denying that. It has a snappy script, good performances, expressive shotmaking, nice choreography and ambitious set pieces. I’m not going to say La La Land is a bad film. It’s clearly not. But there is something off-key about the whole enterprise and I’m afraid the movie couldn’t pull me back once I spotted it.
The film explicitly states that the best way to achieve your dreams, and in the process make SERIOUS art, is to follow your gut instinct to the exclusion of any other kind of commercial avenue which may open itself up to you. This is especially true of Sebastian, a traditional jazz pianist who waxes lyrical about Thelonious Monk but instead finds himself in a well-paid gig as the keyboardist for John Legend’s spangly jazz-light outfit. The film completely denigrates this band painting them as commercial sell outs who wear terrible hats. At one point John Legend has this speech asking how Sebastian is going to revolutionise the genre if he’s stuck in the past. But the film resolutely rejects this argument. This is because the film itself is stuck in the past and is unashamedly wallowing in it from the production design straight out of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg to the now infamous Fame-style opening number set in a LA traffic jam. What Sebastian, and by extension the film, seems to be arguing is revolution can be reached through tradition. The old school is sacred ok? This goes for Sebastian’s dream of opening a jazz bar (called Seb’s) as well as for Chazelle’s decision to make a golden-age Hollywood musical in the 21st Century.
The film’s deployment of jazz music in this context is what I find most troubling. By paralleling this grassroots musical movement rooted in the experiences of African-Americans with the commercial juggernaut of the white Hollywood musical the filmmakers have misstepped out of their otherwise perfectly formed chorus line. Because jazz has never been about the mainstream. The pure jazz that Sebastian talks about is mostly a) brain-meltingly complex and b) performed and composed by African-Americans. For a film that purports to be about this kind of jazz, Sebastian actually woos Mia with a straight-forward, romantic piano ballad that could be the backing track to your mother’s favourite Adele song rather than the kind of furious, heart-stopping music that he claims to adore. At that point, the film’s central specious thesis just collapses in on itself in a heap of self-absorption and unawareness.
By the way, there have been murmurings on Twitter and the like about the film’s white saviour narrative. Once you’ve seen the film, it’s pretty easy to understand that perspective on it. I know that there have been successful white jazz musicians and that genres of music do not exclusively ‘belong’ to one ethnic group over another. I acknowledge that jazz’s own roots are taken from both European American and African-American musical traditions. However, is it really ok for a film that uses the genre to such an extent to have no leading characters of colour? When the only African-American musician featured in the story to any degree whatsoever is discarded for being too ‘mainstream’? Where the actors of colour increasingly feel like set dressing? I don’t think so. I really wanted to like this movie because so many people do and it makes my life easier but alas, ultimately, I just couldn’t.
By the way, if you’re interested in reading more about this I have to give a shout out to four other reviews which made me feel like I wasn’t going crazy. Absolutely worth reading these:
- Richard Brody for The New Yorker
- Ruby Lott-Lavigna for Wired
- Ira Madison III for MTV
- Anna Silman for NY Magazine
And also here’s Scott Timberg not really coming down on either side of the argument but nevertheless calling out us dissidents.
Scott Timberg for Salon
