A Love Song About Bittersweet Happy Endings

Rating: 8/10 (3 January 2017)

After the ebullient opening scene of "La La Land," a musical number staged in an L.A. traffic jam and featuring a cast that celebrates the diversity of that city, I thought I was going to adore "La La Land." But nothing else in the movie quite measures up to that opening scene.
I liked the film, some of it quite a lot, but it did not affect me the way it has so clearly affected others. I'm a bit surprised that people are talking about leaving the movie on a high, or referring to its ending as happy. "La La Land" doesn't exactly end unhappily, but the happiness it does deliver to our principal characters is qualified. The film, both an homage to and a contemporary re-calibration of the MGM musicals of Hollywood's golden age, suggests that human lives have more than one possible happy ending, and that by choosing one you necessarily have to pass over another. Better be sure, then, that the one you choose is the one that will leave you with the fewest regrets about the ones you let pass by.
Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone have enough chemistry to light a fire. Indeed, they have so much that one is almost disappointed that they aren't a real-life couple. I don't know that the characters they play in this film take either actor that far out of his/her comfort zone, but both give terrifically charismatic performances. Stone especially steals the film right out from under the feet of everyone else, Gosling and kinetic director Damien Chazelle (of "Whiplash" fame) included.
I've seen others refer to "La La Land" as a love letter to Los Angeles. I don't know L.A. that well, and what I've seen of it I didn't care for, so I might be biased. But this film struck me as less a valentine to the City of Angels and more of an examination of the allure the world of fame exercises over dreamers, and the determination that world demands of those who are going to make it there.
Grade: A-