Are skylines always so pink in LA? What's lying beneath the gloss and glamour of Hollywood? Does any of it even matter?
This concept of questioning reality forms the backbone of La La Land, an ambitious musical starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone that almost expertly spins myth and reality together. Everything is on the edge of make-belief; especially in the hazy superficial LA where everyone is pretending to be someone they’re not. This includes our two protagonists: actor Mia, played by Stone, who isn’t quite an actor, and Seb, Gosling’s character, an aspiring jazz musician. As you'll soon learn in La La Land, nothing is quite as it seems.
La La Land follows the story of two creatives in LA, failing in various ways but doing so together. After numerous chance encounters push Sebastian and Mia together, they embark on a tumultuous relationship, managing their, at time, conflicting ambitions, and occasionally bursting into song. The scenes are technicolour, the music spans genres, and the dance numbers are spectacular. La La Land is a musical and drama crammed into one.
Consequently, the result is hammy, sometimes lazy with its constant homages, but the inclusion of big musical numbers doesn’t stop us getting intense dramatic exchanges reserved for only the best of the genre. Where musicals can slip into grand melodrama and bad acting, certain moments in La La Land - such as an argument scene towards the last third of the film - show an artfulness to the performance, and a musical not willing to be lazy with its straight scenes.
An interesting theme that runs through the film is the lack of a stable and defined time period. “Where are we?” Mia asks Sebastian at one point, framing this temporal ambiguity. Such concerns weave in and out of the set design (with constant vintage film sets appearing like the real scenes), with big 1950s dance numbers being interrupted by almost anachronistic mobiles ringing. The film is neither modern nor a total pastiche, somewhere quite a-temporal and unsettling; much like the lives of the protagonists.
However, while this gives an almost dream-like quality to the proceedings, this film can't avoid being dated by its racial politics. It focuses on jazz while seemingly pushing the black Americans who pioneered the genre into the background. We constantly hear Gosling explaining how he will save jazz, while behind him black men play the music they created. It’s patronising at times, with scenes showing Gosling playing jazz piano as the only focal point of the camera, or Stone dancing to jazz, both outlined by people of colour, footnotes in a representation of their culture. Various musicians have come out to critique the lack of black or queer characters in a film about jazz and musicals, and it’s a frustrating watch in 2016.
La La Land is a whitewashed musical. It’s fun, Emma Stone is brilliant, and the musical energy and set design is invigorating. However, in a film about jazz, it’s just not good enough to have a film with two white protagonists "whitesplaining" a culture to emerge directly out of black American communities. It will do well at the Oscars: Hollywood loves a movie about itself.
La La Land is released in the UK on January 13.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
