“La La Land’s” music director is Marius de Vries, who’s known for his production on records by such genre-indifferent performers as Madonna and Björk - not to mention his involvement in Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge,” that postmodern movie musical with all kinds of smart things to say about how pop music functions in people’s lives. And they’re doing it in a knowing, hybridized way that undermines Sebastian’s stultifying obsession with purity. Yet with their swooping melodies, lively rhythms and lush Old Hollywood arrangements, Hurwitz’s songs - the best ones, anyway - are doing plenty of the work here.
There’s also the ample star power of two headliners who can’t really sing or dance (but can gaze like nobody’s business). Most effective of all might be “Audition,” a solo for Stone that she performs largely in close-up, her face cycling through nearly every conceivable feeling as the music keeps swelling and receding.Īre these elaborate production numbers helped along by filmmaking razzle-dazzle? Of course. freeway (“Another Day of Sun”), a number in which Mia and her girlfriends get ready for a night on the town (“Someone in the Crowd”) or the gorgeous dream ballet near the end of the movie (“Epilogue”) in which Sebastian and Mia float through an imagined version of their life together. In scenes where the film’s characters aren’t the ones making noise - where a song simply materializes because that’s what happens in a musical - “La La Land” throbs with sensation, be it the opening sequence set on an L.A. Most films about this wonderfully complicated subject have trouble capturing how music works, including Chazelle’s previous project, “Whiplash,” which demonstrates the abuse a young jazz drummer is willing to take from a sadistic teacher without demonstrating why he’s willing to take it.īut few movies as dumb about music as this one are also as alive to its emotional potential. “La La Land” is hardly the first movie to misunderstand music. This stuff isn’t just insufferable it’s unrecognizable as an attitude anyone in 2017 might adopt. Then there are the countless instances of Sebastian mansplaining the importance of jazz - “pure jazz,” as he puts it, without elaborating - to Mia, whose blank expression could be taken as welcome skepticism if the film allowed the character to express an opinion of her own. This screwy value system asserts itself again in a scene where Sebastian, performing with the slick soul-funk band he’s joined at the invitation of his old frenemy Keith (played by John Legend), ignites a crowd with the very tepid “Start a Fire” - a clear indication of how out of touch Chazelle is with the real-world pop he so eagerly denigrates. Yet “La La Land” asks you to distrust your reaction - to accept the movie’s outdated idea that pop isn’t worthy of respect. As a viewer, you identify with miserable Sebastian far less than you do the tipsy, half-dressed starlets cheering from the swimming pool. But the cover band sounds great blazing through “I Ran” by A Flock of Seagulls.
There’s no mistaking the tone of pity in this scene. By this point, we’re already meant to understand that he’s a genuine artist, yet here he is forced to play keytar in a cheesy ’80s-pop cover band - a humiliation made only worse by the arrival of Mia, a woman he’d like to impress, played by Emma Stone. You get a sense early on that “La La Land” is going to have problems when it shows us Sebastian debasing himself for a paycheck at a party in the Hollywood Hills.
But here’s the curious thing about this polarizing movie that gets so much wrong about the purpose and value of art: When “La La Land” uses music in the manner of the classic musicals it’s obviously emulating - not to put us inside a world but to take us out of one - the movie achieves liftoff.