Review by Andrew Swafford
Of all 2016’s critical darlings, the rare original musical La La Land is perhaps beloved most of all, with any outlying detractors being dismissed as “more-disaffected-than-thou film twitter bros” who decided to hate it before watching. It’s easy to see why this is so praised: the film is joyously energetic, unabashedly sentimental, and awash in vibrant primary colors that pop off the screen. Like many awards contenders before it, La La Land is in love with Hollywood’s Golden Age, and gives its audience an obvious visual understanding of how the era earned its name. This is a bubbly, tap-dancing love story that sets one dance number in quintessentially-Californian stalled traffic and another in the iconic cosmic observatory from Rebel Without a Cause. It is, in a word, romantic, in a way that this year has decidedly not been, and it feels like exactly the rush of euphoria needed in a world absolutely drained of energy and optimism.
Or at least it should be…but Damien Chazelle is not interested in making a movie that is all style and effusive emotion. On the surface, La La Land has all of the Hollywood sensibility and musical ambition to warrant that view, but his goals are ultimately elsewhere. Rather than making a simple song-and-dance piece designed to make an audience happy (is it fair to say this was the fundamental goal of the archetypal musical?), Chazelle is interested in exploring the ethics of art. In all three of the director’s features, his protagonists have been jazz musicians struggling to find validation from those around them—and Whiplash and La La Land are especially interested in the lengths an artist will go (or should[n’t] go) in order to be appreciated.
Damien Chazelle’s last film, Whiplash, is a relatively simple story about a young drummer who accepts constant abuse from a domineering instructor in his quest for all-time greatness, and it presents a disturbing, but laser-focused dramatization of a very specific question:
Q: Is abuse an acceptable/effective form of motivation?
As a particularly soft-spoken educator, the question interests me. And much like the film’s protagonist, the strength of the movie lies in its sense of focus; it has a single-minded determination to get to the bottom of that question, and when the film’s virtuosic final performance comes to a close, the narrative offers a clear but harsh truth—
A: It may not be ethical, but it sure as hell WORKS.
—then cuts to credits for the audience to just deal with it. Many critics were put off by the borderline sadistic way the dilemma was explored, but it is undeniable that the dilemma was the focus; this was the Cinema of Ethics.
La La Land is more ambitious than Whiplash in every conceivable way: it is longer, it has a more complicated plot, it doubles the number of artist-protagonists, it upgrades musical performance to musical theater, and it poses significantly more ethical dilemmas about art to wrestle with. I’m going to ignore the film’s obvious cinematic qualities in order to focus on the ethical side—because I’m not sure Chazelle has much to say this time around. Here are a few of the questions I see the film most clearly posing:
Q1: Should an artist give up on their dream if it seems too improbable?
Q2: Should an artist compromise their vision to pursue mass appeal?
Q3: Is artistic passion worth sacrificing a romantic relationship for?
In a post-Whiplash world, it seems as though Chazelle wants us to find answers to questions like these by plugging his characters’ ideologies/decisions into the movie’s formulaic system of reward/punishment to find some type of philosophical truth.
I’ll say up front that each/all of these questions are much less interesting that Whiplash’s singular one, and the whole enterprise of working them out feels ~weird~ to me. Moral ambiguity no-doubt exists, but the purpose of ethics is to at least try to find an objectively right answer—and to ask ethical questions about a profoundly subjective medium seems slightly pointless. The questions themselves are still essential ones for individual creators to make peace with, though, so I see the merit in trying. If finding Chazelle’s answers by working through the plot seems boring to you, you can stop reading here and click away with my assertion that La La Land’s “message” about its own ethical dilemmas ends up being muddled, uninteresting, and above all, unsatisfying. If you want to see the drawn-out, spoiler-filled proof, bear with me.
Q1: Should an artist give up on their dream if it seems too improbable?
La La Land features only two real characters—Ryan Gosling’s Sebastian and Emma Stone’s Mia (the acting duo, of course, has a well-documented and already established chemistry)—and both are textbook California dreamers. Mia has left her home in the Midwest to pursue a career in acting, inspired by classic Hollywood films like Casablanca and Notorious, with countless other titles lining her walls in poster form (though she strangely has never seen Rebel Without a Cause…). When we first see her, she is holding up traffic on an already congested interstate ramp due to being overly focused on practicing lines. We see her in-and-out of auditions in which she is never given more than a few seconds to make a good impression, and so she remains a barista after six years of reaching for success. Sebastian, on the other hand, is a jazz pianist who dreams of owning his own club (in a historic building that is currently being—according to him—criminally misused). In the meantime, he is forced to go through the motions of 80s pop covers behind obnoxious vocalists at pool parties, as well as to hammer out soulless renditions of “Jingle Bells” and “Deck the Halls” at restaurant gigs, never allowed to indulge in the Bill Evans-style free jazz that flows from his fingers effortlessly. He’s a purist, and sees “true” jazz as a dying art form abandoned by a cruel and ignorant society, and his own purpose is to save it from extinction. (The racial makeup of the film’s cast even makes it possible to read this as a “white savior” narrative, which has been written about expertly here.) For most of the film, both characters seem doomed to irrelevance by a Hollywood machine that doesn’t value them, and thus the dilemma presents itself: if dream-fulfillment is never gonna happen, should they give up?
They both do, at one point or another. After Mia puts on a one-person show that almost no one comes to (more on seeking validation through large crowds later), she abandons Los Angeles altogether in order to return to her hometown of Boulder City, NV before serendipitously receiving a phone call for an audition that ends up rocketing her to superstardom. As for Sebastian, he gives up the dream of owning a jazz club in order to get a steady paycheck from a rock band that he isn’t particularly passionate about (so much more about this later, too). However, when the film flashes to “five years later” in its final section, he has miraculously achieved his dream and is drawing huge crowds at his own place.
What is the message here? Both artists struggle against the current for years before their dreams are realized, to the point where most of us would likely give up. But then those dreams are realized, in a way that feels irrational and unearned. Is Chazelle saying that all dreams can potentially be fulfilled with enough time and effort? Is he saying that dreams are fulfilled by those whose talent truly deserve it? Is he saying that dreams are fulfilled by pure dumb luck and random chance? I don’t feel as though any of these interpretations has enough evidence to recommend it, mostly because he only gives us half of its case study. La La Land gives its audience what feels like dozens of scenes centering around Sebastian and his musical talent/taste that makes him obviously deserving of success (and even then—why is he not successful for so long and then just is, all of a sudden?), but there’s almost nothing that showcases Mia’s passion or talent. All of her auditions are either cut short or are frankly not that impressive…and both times she performs her one-woman-show, Chazelle’s editor only shows us its final moments. What is to account for her success? Is she extremely talented from the start and just needed time to be discovered, or is it only when she shows her true potential and ambition that she becomes successful? I suppose the most plausible answer is that success in the world of art is something that happens by random chance, but is that because Chazelle truly believes this, or because his script is too messy to support any other interpretation? In any case, any answer one could come to feels unsatisfying, which will become a continually frustrating theme of this essay.
Q2: Should an artist compromise their vision to pursue mass appeal?
This is the big one. Many conversations in the film center around the question of whether or not an artist should consider the size of their audience in the creative process, and there are many moments in the film that offer conflicting views of validation-through-crowds. I’m going to focus on Gosling’s Sebastian here, due to the fact that we see almost no trace of Mia’s art. He often dismisses the idea of appeasing a mass audience by exclaiming “pise caca!” and continually exhibits a more-artistic-than-thou attitude that is rarely challenged but is often contradicted.
First is the restaurant scene when Sebastian abandons his obligatory setlist of Christmas carols to explore the improvisational world of free jazz. He stops caring about what the audience wants to hear in order to present his true artistic vision (which is romanticized with Chazelle’s lighting/camerawork), but is thusly met with awkward stares of shock and disbelief—as well as being fired from the gig. There’s also the scene when he is forced to play 80s covers by request at a pool party that is meant to be seen as emasculating and embarrassing (which shows some of Chazelle’s own elitism). Scenes like this are meant to serve as support for Sebastian when he tells Mia not to care about drawing large crowds with her acting—screw them! What do the masses know about art anyway! However, when she finally puts on that one-woman-show and it’s a flop with the audience, it is played as tragedy. If we aren’t supposed to care how big of a crowd she is drawing as long as she’s living out her passion, why does the film all of a sudden want us to be sad that almost no one shows up?
Then there’s John Legend’s character, who offers Sebastian a steady gig in a jazz rock band that ends up becoming extremely successful. The catch: they’re going to incorporate pop and electronic elements that are in vogue at the moment. At their first practice, Sebastian’s soulful piano is rudely interrupted by an intrusive electronic breakbeat triggered by John Legend at a MIDI controller; Legend later gives Sebastian a speech about how jazz is about the future, and has to constantly evolve in order to exist. This bristles Sebastian’s purist ideals, and it’s unclear how Chazelle wants us to feel about Legend as a whole. Is he Mephistopheles, stealing Sebastian’s soul for money and success—or is he a guardian angel, meant to keep Gosling from self-destructing on his own backward ideas of tradition and purity? Maybe there’s nothing bad about Legend’s band, but they’re just a distraction from Sebastian’s dream? The film is unclear.
[A not-so-brief side note about electronics/experimentation in jazz: if we ARE meant to agree with Sebastian that electronics and experimentation have no place in jazz, then Chazelle himself has an overly simplistic view of the genre. In Sebastian’s eyes, jazz either has the rootsy, organic feel of Louie Armstrong or it’s an abomination. This is ridiculous in many ways, but one is that it’s simply hypocritical. Sebastian himself says that Louie Armstrong rebelled against the established way of doing things, and in doing so changed the world—so why would his music rule out the possibility of change within the genre? Outside of internal inconsistency, this view suggests that Chazelle hasn’t even listened to much jazz recorded after the 1950s. Miles Davis experimented with ambient and atonal music on In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew in 1969 and 1970 respectively, and he reinvented himself again by incorporating elements of rock and funk on the albums Jack Johnson and On the Corner in subsequent years. Has Chazelle never heard Davis-protégé Herbie Hancock’s 1973 album Head Hunters or his 1983 album Future Shock, both of which incorporate heavy use of synthesizers and drum machines? Then you have musicians like Flying Lotus (the nephew of Alice and John Coltrane—the latter of which Sebastian keeps a framed picture of) who performs something akin to free jazz using purely bitcrushed electronic beats. There’s also hip-hop producers who rely almost exclusively on jazz samples, such as Nujabes and Madlib, who was invited to remix the entire Blue Note catalog for his 2003 album Shades of Blue. The list goes on and on. Jazz has been constantly intermingling with other genres for the last 50+ years, and I would argue that diversity is what makes any genre interesting.]
Things get more complex when we see the band (“The Messengers”) perform. There are two kinds of shots here: shots of the band and shots of the audience. When we see the band, captured in a concert-film or music-video style, an atmosphere of fun pervades the film, and Sebastian even seems kind of happy! (Much more so than he does playing Christmas carols and 80s covers, anyways…) The music is upbeat, positive, and yes, poppy. But not in a way that feels soul crushing or mechanical. Gosling does have to play a robotic-looking touchpad keyboard that doesn’t have actual keys, though—maybe this offends him. I’d gladly play around with this, if he’s not gonna keep it. On the other hand, there are shots of the crowd—which is a monolithic mass of blonde, attractive, happy, idiotic looking people who keep shoving Emma Stone’s Mia out of the way. So far, Chazelle has given us awful large crowds who hate Sebastian’s true artistic visions and awful large crowds who love his sell-out corporate side. The message constructed so far, elitist as it is, seems like a clear one, and the painfully awkward photoshoot scene for the band’s record label that happens soon after cements this view that appeasing large crowds just isn’t worth it.
But then, all of a sudden, the last section of the film contradicts this. When Gosling finally opens his jazz club, there’s not an empty seat in the house, and the crowd isn’t depicted with the tonal derision that Chazelle used before. How did he manage to draw such a big crowd without selling his soul? The film does not tell us this. We also have Mia, who has become massively and unexplainably famous without (presumably) selling hers either—when she walks into Sebastian’s club in the film’s final section, they lock eyes and trigger an extended flashback/parallel universe montage (one of the most visually stunning sections of the film) that shows what could have been. Part of what could have been is her one-woman-show drawing a massive, screaming crowd. How are we as an audience supposed to feel about crowds in general? Are they what an artist craves to feel validated and satisfied? Or are they uncultured and tasteless, to be avoided at all costs? The film tries to have it both ways, and the message is, again, immensely dissatisfying and frustrating.
Q3: Is artistic passion worth sacrificing a romantic relationship for?
In the middle of La La Land, Chazelle shifts his focus from music to romance (I’ve heard from many many friends and critics that the film “forgets its’ a musical” about 45 minutes in), and it becomes about Sebastian and Mia struggling to balance their artistic/professional lives and their romantic ones. There are dual dilemmas faced by Mia and Sebastian, but they both have the same basic problem—how can one maintain a relationship with a lover while also pursuing artistic success, which is time consuming and often requires traveling around the world on short notice?
In Sebastian’s case, the dilemma presents itself in the form of a tour. John Legend’s band has become an overnight success, and so The Messengers need to leave for a multi-year tour immediately. Mia can’t come along because she has her own professional endeavors to pursue at home (and besides, who would want to go to a podunk place like Boise anyways, the film seems to suggest). The decision to go puts a strain on the relationship, and therefore the emotional core of the movie. I’ve heard from many that the film has a “sad ending” which is all to do with the fact that the two romantic leads don’t end up together. The fact that the film plays this as tragedy (when one of it’s primary inspirations—Jaques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg—profoundly doesn’t) should tell us that romantic love is ultimately more valuable than artistic dreams. But if that’s the case, what was literally everything else in the movie about then?
Mia’s story is, as always, more hazy and troubling. When she unexpectedly gets her deus-ex-Hollywood-machine audition at the end of the film, she is driven to the audition by Sebastian and told by her soon-to-be-bosses that she’ll need to travel to Paris to prepare for and film the part. Then we get a scene of her talking to Sebastian about how their future is uncertain and—BAM—five years later, they aren’t together and, worse, she’s married to another man (who we crucially don’t get any information about, so we’re by default programmed to hate him cause he’s not Sebastian). But, again, how are we supposed to feel about her success? So much of this film is about working to achieve your dreams—and both characters get literally EVERYTHING they want from the Los Angeles machine. But was it worth the cost of love? In her fantasy montage sequence previously mentioned, Mia imagines a full life with Sebastian—so that must be what she truly wants, right? But the fulfillment of an artist’s dreams are literally what the entire rest of the movie seems to be selling us, so it seems as if Chazelle doesn’t want to commit to an answer here. Maybe the answer is merely that a sacrifice has to be made one way or the other, and that someone can’t truly “have it all” if “all” includes both artistic success and monogamous romance. But even that answer is way too waffly and middle-of-the-road to make for a compelling message.
IN CONCLUSION
There is no conclusion. 3,000+ words later, and I am no closer to understanding what La La Land wants me to understand about the woes of the artist. What made Whiplash polarizing and compelling was its dedication to presenting a very specific viewpoint, even though said viewpoint was never pleasant or comforting. That film is perhaps the perfect example of how a movie doesn’t need a “nice” point of view to be great, but it does need to have one. La La Land sees Chazelle upping his game in terms of how many questions he’s willing to take on (there are more than three, but I don’t have the energy to work them all out), but shows him getting lazy in his dedication to answering them. For all of it’s technical appeal, La La Land’s handling of its central questions is like when your high school English teacher assigned you to write a persuasive essay on a controversial issue and you got a C because your thesis was “both sides have valid points.” You weren’t wrong, but your essay was boring because it had no reason to exist.