Review: La La Land

by Patrick Bromley Magic. I have written at some length before about a type of film I have dubbed the "exploding heart movie," whi...

by Patrick Bromley

Magic.

I have written at some length before about a type of film I have dubbed the "exploding heart movie," which is a movie that speaks directly to us in such a way so as to cause a kind of emotional overload, filling us with so much love and joy that it feels like we're going to burst. Everyone had different exploding heart movies, and everyone's exploding heart moments in their exploding heart movies are different. This, of course, is because we are all unique and beautiful snowflakes.

La La Land is writer/director Damien Chazelle's exploding heart movie, designed not just to speak to the emotions of the audience -- and boy, does it ever -- but to lay bare all of the joy and passion the filmmaker feels about making movies. The film has been described as a love letter to Los Angeles or to classic Hollywood musicals. I guess it's those things. To me, La La Land is a love letter to anyone who loves movies. It's Chazelle saying "I am lucky to make movies. I love movies. You, the audience, loves movies. Let's fucking love this movie together." It works. I fucking love this movie.

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone star in this Gangster Squad reunion as Sebastian and Mia, two budding artists trying to make it in Los Angeles. He's a piano player who dreams of opening his own old-school jazz club, in the meantime trying to get by playing Christmas carols in restaurants and filling in on keyboards for bad '80s cover bands. She dreams of being an actress, but like all would-be actresses is working as a barista in a coffee shop on the Warner Bros. lot. They meet, then meet again. After meeting a few times, they realize they like one another -- and, better yet, inspire one another to be better and reach further than either is doing on their own. Before you can say "they probably fall in love and sing and dance," they fall in love and sing and dance.

Yes, La La Land is a musical -- a sprawling, wildly ambitious, gorgeously photographed and perfectly choreographed musical. From the opening number, an astonishing single-take number in stuck traffic on the L.A. freeway, to "A Lovely Night," one of the most charming first dates in memory, to the breathtaking and gravity-defying "Planetarium" to the show-stopping "Audition" (the number that is likely to singlehandedly score Emma Stone a Best Actress nomination), nearly all of the musical sequences achieve one kind of transcendence or another. I won't argue that all of the songs themselves are great; there are standouts like "City of Stars," but others that faded from memory moments after they had finished. What does not fade is the exuberant energy with which Chazelle (and choreographer Mandy Moore [not that Mandy Moore]) stage the numbers, using them sometimes to advance the story but mostly to express emotions being felt by the characters that are too big to be expressed in words. This is the beauty of musicals, and what separates them from more "realistic" stories.

"But what if I don't like musicals?" you ask. That is your right. You are a snowflake. While I cannot predict what you, reader, will or will not enjoy (nor would I want to), I can say that I'm not 100% sure I love musicals either. But I do respond to both the emotion and the technical execution of every number in La La Land, nearly all of which made my heart explode more than anything else this year. Sometimes I was swept up in the beauty of the photography by Linus Sandgren, who shoots Los Angeles in a way that is painterly and romanticized while still capturing a realism and familiarity that other movies fail to achieve. Often I was moved by Chazelle's simultaneous expression of control and bravado -- he's made a movie bursting with big feelings that radiate off the screen but has done so in a way that is expertly staged and timed and edited. I've always liked movies that take big swings, and La La Land is nothing but big swings. Like Paul Thomas Anderson graduating from Hard Eight to Boogie Nights, Damien Chazelle has cashed in all the goodwill earned by his Oscar-nominated debut Whiplash to make a movie that is bigger and riskier but which once again concerns itself first and foremost with expressing an emotional state through form.

I know that La La Land isn't going to have the same effect on everyone. That's true of any movie, but especially true of exploding heart movies. For some, the story may seem too slight and the emotional beats too familiar. Maybe these things are true. Beyond the romance at the center, the film has a lot to say about the need to create, about the lasting impact of art, about the ways we can draw strength from those around us to do the things we maybe couldn't do without making these emotional connections. Besides, I have a hard time accepting the idea that human happiness is "slight," and while we may recognize the emotions being expressed on screen, I'm not sure I've seen them expressed in quite this way. Chazelle cuts right to the core of one our most basic emotions but then dresses it up in some of the most exciting, buoyant filmmaking I've seen all year. La La Land floats for two hours and refuses to come down even after the credits have rolled. This is classic movie magic.