La La Land stars two enormously talented actors, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, who are not traditional music stars. Their silhouettes (pictured above) illustrate the sloppy, endearing dance style which has made audiences fall in love with the movie since 2016 (Courtesy of Human after all on creative commons).
Welcome to Dumpuary—the first quarter of every movie calendar, the post-Oscars regression where good movies have been laid to rest and there is nothing to look forward to cinematically until summer blockbusters roll around. To make matters worse, Dumpuary 2020 is an extended one due to the earliest Academy Awards in the ceremony’s history and a blockbuster season that is pushed as late as May—where the drought will end with a flood of Dev Patel-starring period pieces in The Personal History of David Copperfield and A24’s The Green Knight.
Consider the weekend box office, specifically last week’s new movies. Notable releases include Downhill, the disappointing new Will Ferrel dramedy which made a meager $4.6 million domestically, and Fantasy Island—the monkey’s paw thriller from Sony that currently sits at 9 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The weekend’s champion was the Sonic the Hedgehog adaptation whose lukewarm reception stands in stark contrast to the other garbage currently available in theaters.
If you do want to see a movie and support the struggling movie theater business, go see Oscar movies—like the triumphant Parasite—that still have showtimes at select theaters. If you’re like me, however, you’re left pining over what could be during this empty movie slate. I dream a dream of times gone by, when hope was high and movie musicals ruled Hollywood.
Dumpuary seems like fertile soil for the newly-revitalized genre—movie musicals are optimistic, fun and perfect for the dreary mid-February doldrums. The problem is there isn’t a good one coming out until Jon M. Chu’s In the Heights adaptation premiering in June.
So, to combat this content drought let’s look at the movie that sparked this contemporary movie musical renaissance. La La Land, WTF?
It’s been more than 70 years since the likes of Singin’ in the Rain, The Easter Parade and The Wizard of Oz reigned supreme. While musical elements appear in media ranging from Super Bowl commercials to an episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” the original live-action Hollywood movie musical was as dead as The Wicked Witch of the West after her unwanted bubble bath.
La La Land may be most known for (rightfully) losing Best Picture to 2016’s Moonlight in a now-famous Academy Awards snafu, but it remains a poignant love letter to the golden age of movie musicals while standing against the test of time on its own merits.
Movie musicals’ charm is in the inherent freedom characters have to spontaneously burst into song and dance combined with the intrinsic polish and spectacle that makes up any well-crafted movie. La La Land leans into the pageantry by turning its titular city into an idyllic Technicolor fairyland and giving us a pair of Los Angeles wannabes in aspiring actress Mia and struggling jazz pianist Sebastian—brought to life irresistibly by Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, respectively.
Gosling and Stone are immensely talented actors, but they’re only passable singers and dancers. Their lacking musical gifts only make the movie more endearing, however, as it allows the audience to truly buy into the fantasy that these are normal people bold enough to express their internal strife in the purest way. While a song like “A Lovely Night” would undoubtedly be show-stopping in the hands of powerhouse Broadway performers, the actors-turned-singers inhabit it with the unmatchable earnestness that only comes from trying your hardest and only getting “good enough” results.
These inconsistent talents obviously result in some musical limitations—there’s certainly no “Defying Gravity” or “One Day More” equivalent to be found—it is forgiven because La La Land isn’t just a cast album on Spotify, it’s a movie. Stellar filmmaking elevates average-at-best songs, but that’s because the musical numbers are working in the service of a brutal heartrending romance—if a movie musical gets your heart to take over for your brain then it’s doing its job.
Ultimately, La La Land is a story about star crossed lovers stuck in a ménage à trois with their own selfish ambitions. Its theme, common to all of director Damien Chazelle’s films thus far, revolves around the price of greatness and what people are willing to sacrifice to get there. In Mia and Sebastian’s case that price is their life together; the pair’s doomed love is inevitable and inescapable, burning as fuel for both individuals’ idealized Los Angeles fairytale.
The movie’s bittersweet cynicism is captured in a single shot, a shared look between a tortured, lonely Sebastian and a surprised Mia after she, now a famous movie star, and her husband—upsettingly not played by Ryan Gosling—unknowingly stumble into Sebastian’s popular new jazz club. An idyllic, gutting one-shot fantasy sequence ensues to pointedly remind the audience of what could have been, and the pair shares a melancholic smile full of mutual respect and understanding. It isn’t the happily ever audiences root for, no, but the moment remains affecting and thought-provoking regardless of how many times it’s watched.
While it would be unrealistic to expect an elite awards-bait movie musical like La La Land to be released in the year’s first quarter to save us from Dumpuary, even a hollow, empty alternative like 2017’s The Greatest Showman would be preferable to the speedy blue hedgehog movie.
This time of year sucks; February is cold and damp and dark and it seems like everyone is sad all the time. You know who isn’t sad? People watching movie musicals. La La Land is elite and the lucrative The Greatest Showman (which made $435 million at the box office) is proof of concept. Give us what we want, Hollywood.