A Love Letter To Musicals

Rating: 7/10 (16 May 2017)

I love movie musicals. They're hard to find these days but in their time they were some of the greatest movies made. To this day I can sit and watch SINGIN' IN THE RAIN and never once be bored. The MGM musicals of the 50s were some of the most entertaining films ever made. There have been others made since that are just as good. Which brings us to the recently heralded LA LA LAND.
The film opens with a huge traffic jam on the LA freeway. It doesn't take long before someone breaks into song and everyone is out of their cars, singing and dancing about the beautiful California sun and how each of them came here with the hope and dream of becoming a star. As the music fades the camera pans into one particular car where Emma Stone as Mia is reading through her lines again as she prepares for an audition paying so much attention to them that she fails to move when the traffic lets up. Behind her Ryan Gosling as Sebastian honks and then swerves around her.
This is the first encounter between these two characters, dreamers with hopes of making it big, of achieving their dreams in a world where everyone wants the same thing. Stone eventually makes her audition but like all of the rest before it's a casting call where tons are seen but few are chosen and she hasn't been chosen yet. When not making auditions she works as a barista in a coffee shop on the Warner Brothers lot.
Down but not out, Mia's roommates convince her to go with them to a party in hopes of making contacts in the business. More singing and dancing follows and Mia leaves the party to find her car has been towed. Walking home she hears a piano playing in a small club, enters and sees Sebastian at the piano playing something that enchants her. Unfortunately he's supposed to be playing Christmas music and is fired, brushing past Mia before they can be introduced.
We bounce back in time to their earlier encounter and find out about Sebastian. He's a jazz fanatic and dreams of the day he can open his own club, playing real jazz and not some twisted version of it. His sister wants him to grow up, to date someone and to abandon his dreams for reality. But he hangs tough. In the meantime to pay the bills he plays in a cover band which happens to be performing at a pool party that Mia attends. It's obvious these two were meant to find one another.
The chance encounter leads to another song and dance number between the two and off the road to romance they go. It's a slow beginning with a few hiccups along the way, but they do indeed get together finally. The question is will they be able to stay together? Not only that but will they be able to achieve the dreams they both have, dreams that everyone who comes here has? Will they both achieve those dreams and if not what if one rises while the other falls? The story seems simple at its base but the ribbons wrapped around it make for a decent light hearted drama. Many musicals were formed this way. As I said, I love musicals and when I heard about this one I thought it was a dream come true, Hollywood returning to a genre thought dead. But the end results are mixed for me. Some will love this film and others hate it. I fell in between.
The imagery on hand here is fantastic at times. Glimpses of LA at its best are mingled with fantasy sequences that stun. But at the same time it feels forced, a sort of look at me type film that tries so hard but doesn't quite achieve the status of the films it celebrates. It isn't one thing that does this either. The performances by both Stone and Gosling are wonderful. Their singing and dancing numbers together remind you of those old movies. And yet I never felt invested in what was going on.
For me the weakest part perhaps was the music. It's not that it's bad, it just never rose to the classics I remember. I didn't hear a song that I knew I'd be singing in my head later on. The lyrics were not the sing song back and forth type from those old movies, songs that I can remember to this day. Here I can't recall many of the lyrics for any of the songs I heard. The same holds true for the tunes that those lyrics are wrapped around.
In the end the movie was a fun film to watch. It reaches its goal of trying to bring back memories of those bygone days of movie musicals. At the same time my guess is it won't ignite a spark in Hollywood to make more and that's sad. The movie musical deserves to be a genre that carries on to this day. If this film doesn't at least inspire someone to make more perhaps it will at least keep it alive with the hopes of their return some day. At least it gives us something to enjoy until then.