I guess I just don't get it...

Rating: 2/10 (18 November 2019)

I finally broke down and watched this movie. I am a huge fan of the movie musical, and I understood what they were trying to get at with this thing, but it was just such a mess.
I don't ever think I've finished watching a musical and felt blah. As the end credits rolled, I had to think, "that's it? What was the point of all that? To depress the hell out of me?"
Where did the love between these two characters go? To achieve their dreams, they were rendered completely incompatible. Who was the other dude? Why did she marry him? Did she really love him? Was it necessary for her to become a stuck up starlette? Was that what she really wanted in the end-to forget about everything and everyone who helped get her there? Are we supposed to glean that this nice girl from Nevada wanted to get famous and finally have the license to feel above it all?
If that was the upshot of the whole thing, I think they missed the point of the movie musical. I'll go back to "Singing in the Rain," where sacrificing your scruples and personality after you "make it big," was generally frowned upon.
It's weird that the image of her success was a look of abject horror when she realized she was entering the club of someone she purportedly cared and loved but apparently had done little to keep in touch with, or care what he was up to over the last five years...seeing as he was the one who basically enabled her success. Strange that her success is demonstrated in the film by showing her flake out on a friend's performance in a play because she didn't want to sit in LA traffic. Was I supposed to like her in the end? Feel happy for her stardom?
When we see Gosling in the end, he has everything he wanted, yet when he sees Stone's character he seems wracked with sadness and longing for a person who apparently didn't yearn or care as much as he did. At the end, the characters seem to say through their expressions, "well hey, at least we're successful..." but was that really enough?
So I guess what this movie taught me was that all Hollywood and its inhabitants can hope to aspire to, is a jovial facade to mask a yawning emptiness below the surface. And if that was the point all along, then I suppose the movie musicals that I love are a thing of the past, and that's a shame.