Reality vs Musicals

Rating: Null/10 (11 January 2017)

A Review of 'La La Land' (2016, Damien Chazelle)
When one watches a musical, the moviegoer braces himself to watching a story of a la la land, where the colors are bright, the songs and dances are loud (and gay--happy and otherwise), and the characters scream their emotions to the screen. Musicals are usually hammy and fun. One ends up leaving the cinema, humming a few songs from the film, hoping to extend the magic of the musical and make the positivity seep into one's reality.
La La Land is not a moviegoer's typical musical. The colors are mostly muted, most of the songs are not the ones to give you a severe case of LSS, and the character's emotions are contained, subtle even. The moviegoer gets out of the cinema, not humming, but thinking of how this new musical worked despite not following the tried and tested conventions of musicals.
I applaud how the director, Damien Chazelle, fuses his love for jazz music in this film, reminiscent of his earlier fantastic work, Whiplash. The unexpected, quirky nature of jazz parallels the turns in the movie's narrative, elevating this simple musical to its a dizzying, profound, rich climax.
The performance of both Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling are sober-ly appropriate, as if one has seen a jazz concert and the players are too cool to admit that they slew their performance. But I have to hand it to Emma Stone, where in one singing scene, she stole my heart with the subtle emotions in her face, both in cathartic mode AND in perfectly melodic tune.
Admittedly, La La Land seems like a shoo-in for award festivals, because it is the kind of movie that Hollywood loves. It is set in City of Stars after all (La La Land as set in Los Angeles, so yeah, wordplay on 'LA' La Land). Filmbuffs would rejoice at some references to classics like Singin' in the Rain and Casablanca. But the casual moviegoers would still be able to identify the reality that the lovers have had to deal with.
It's a classic love story spoiled by practicality; it is a classic story of how the dichotomy of appearance and reality interweave and catch up with one another. The movie in our head wants the musical, but our modern selves also believe that the musical is too ideal, too good to be true. The last twenty minutes of the movie takes the moviegoer to this dilemma and we ask ourselves if we have become so jaded that we do recognize that the musical has to give way to a saner, sadder conclusion.
After a long time, in La La Land, we finally have a classic musical that represents our current decade, our reality, our times. Though our now is steeped in financial practicality getting in the way of our passions, jaded ideals of love and courtship both online and offline, there lies within all of us a subtle, oftentimes ignored, voice that still longs for the music and magic even just to rekindle that spark--or at least to remember how deliciously beautiful our past and dreams were.