The director Damien Chazelle’s notion of artistic power isn’t merely inseparable from his notion of will power; it’s the very embodiment of it—louder, faster, and alone are his standards of musical quality. The drummer in his 2014 film “Whiplash” doesn’t play well with others. He practices obsessively in his room until his fingers bleed; he doesn’t jam with his classmates or sit in with other musicians in clubs or bars but focusses single-mindedly on impressing his tyrannical professor in order to be included in the school’s ostensibly career-making concert band. When he gets into the band, he endures a bloody car wreck to make a gig on time and, onstage, makes his bones not by the sensitivity or imagination of his accompaniment but by commandeering the stage, shutting up and shutting out the entire band with a bombastic solo of such red-hot exertion that it’s unclear whether he’ll be showered with applause or baking soda.
So it is with Chazelle’s musical “La La Land,” in which his two protagonists, who live in Los Angeles, don’t play well with others, either. Mia (Emma Stone), an actress who’s working as a barista at a café on the Warner Bros. lot, fails at auditions but tries to make a name for herself by writing, self-financing, and performing a one-woman show—and her biggest audition involves her solo performance of a monologue of her own making, for a starring role in a movie that has no script and will, a casting agent says, be “built around” her. Sebastian, or Seb (Ryan Gosling), wants to open a jazz club and wants to play jazz (“pure jazz,” he says), but his pianistic ideal, and the setting in which he shines, is solo.
Their paths cross, and cross, and cross again by chance—first, at the tail end of the opening scene, which takes place in a traffic jam on the freeway. Mia’s rehearsing at the steering wheel of her Prius, blocking Seb’s way in his classic-Detroit sixties or seventies convertible; he honks, she gives him the finger, and the rest is inevitable. But, even before they’ve met, Chazelle has slathered the movie with his coercive version of charm: a massive dance sequence for the drivers stuck on the freeway, emerging from their vehicles, young and old alike (but almost all young), to leap and twirl between and atop cars in one gliding and swivelling long take. The shot remains, for the most part, nearly at eye level, and it doesn’t convey the delights or inspirations of the dancers in relation to their setting so much as the conspicuous labor of rehearsal and execution that kept everyone in order and in place throughout the number and used the camera to cram it all in.
I saw “La La Land” in a theatre, sitting up close to a big bright screen, and couldn't tell whether it was filmed on location or in a studio in front of a green screen. If Chazelle’s intention was to celebrate, among other things, the public face of the city, he failed miserably at it—certainly compared with such masterworks, classic and modern, like Jacques Demy’s “Model Shop” and Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere.” His big production numbers—a gruff-to-gentle pas de deux for Mia and Seb beneath the streetlights and a splashily colorful jazz ballet in front of a conspicuously painted and lighted and silhouette-shaded theatrical backdrop—are studious, effortful, rehearsed to death, personality-free, and lacking in the essential factor: wonder. Chazelle strives to impress, to wow, to dazzle—but not to inspire; his musical ideas and visual sensibility are jolting neither in their surfaces nor in their substance, neither in their action nor in their images; they close off the imagination rather than opening it.
The one thing that Chazelle seems to have little interest in is life. He turns Mia into an absolute cipher, giving her nothing whatsoever to talk about. The experience that she discusses with Seb is of her aunt, an actress, who, she says, introduced her to classic movies (she cites “Casablanca,” “Bringing Up Baby,” and “Notorious”); she mentions having dropped out of college to pursue her dream in Los Angeles. And that’s just about all. Scenes of Mia and Seb together are focussed almost exclusively on the action at hand; their dates are shown mainly in a montage that features no dialogue; at a disastrous dinner out with her temporary boyfriend Greg (Finn Wittrock), Mia sits silent. As for her one-woman show, Chazelle doesn’t offer more than a phrase or two—except, perhaps, in the abstracted form of a song that Mia delivers at a key moment, one that’s all about her aunt.
Mia writes and produces and stages her one-woman show at a theatre, but Chazelle has no interest in the vitality and conflict and fascinating details of that process—there’s nothing about her working with others on it, whether a stage director or a lighting technician. Nothing about the making of sets, nothing about rehearsing, nothing about the concrete details of the business. When Mia visits her family in Boulder City, there’s no family life whatsoever on view. Chazelle is interested in Mia not as a character or as a person but as an ornament, a symbol of a kind of dream and a kind of success, and he puts her into his film empty, leaving her to be filled solely by the personality and the talent of Stone herself—and it’s a mark of Stone’s artistry that she puts so much into so little. All the movie’s charm emerges from her performance. Even working with such thin material, she infuses passing events with candied inspiration, as when, flirting with Seb while he’s playing keyboards in a cheesy costume with a cheesy cover band at a pool party, she delivers the movie’s liveliest and most authentic moment, her lip-synch to the song she’d requested, “I Ran.”
As for Seb, he does talk—and how and when he talks is yet another mark of Chazelle’s lumpish taste. Seb is obsessed with jazz—with classic jazz from, seemingly, the twenties through the fifties or early sixties. He’s stuck playing piano in a restaurant where he’s ordered by the boss (J. K. Simmons) to play the set list of Christmas tunes when what he wants to play is his own style of music. “I don’t wanna hear the free jazz,” the boss tells him. But, when Seb nonetheless takes matters into his own hands, what he plays sounds nothing like free jazz—it’s a maudlin little waltz that he then turns bombastic, much closer to Eddy Duchin or Liberace than to Cecil Taylor or, for that matter, Art Tatum, who’d have had no trouble making great jazz from Christmas carols.
The height of artistic and cinematic crudeness conjoined arrives in a scene that’s staged as a revelation. Mia tells Seb that she hates jazz, complaining that what passed in her home town for a jazz radio station was used as background music for parties and everyone talked while it was playing. Seb is determined to introduce her to the real thing, and he immediately takes her to a club, where a quintet is playing some vigorous (if derivative) post-bop—and after the first few notes are heard Seb launches into his elaborate mansplanation of the origins and merits of jazz, talking volubly and inexhaustibly over the music he loves as if it were nothing but the local background station.
The movie’s big plot involves Seb’s unhappiness at his good fortune. He’s approached by an old friend named Keith (John Legend), the guitarist, singer, and leader of a successful jazz-pop band called the Messengers. They have a record deal and a tour, and Keith offers Seb a thousand dollars a week plus some juicy extras to play keyboards with them, to go on tour with them, to join them in their record deals for a major label. It’s not pure acoustic, bop-centered jazz; it requires Seb to play electric keyboards and to back Keith’s singing, and it doesn’t leave Seb a lot of solo space—but, with mixed motives and mixed emotions, he joins, and that gig causes trouble between him and Mia.
The music that the Messengers make isn’t bad—not exactly great jazz, but pleasant enough. In any case, Chazelle doesn’t care enough about the life of musicians, or the life of art, to put that work into personal or historical context. (Electronics in jazz? Great musicians in their youth taking commercial work?) The scene in which Seb’s new gig threatens to come between him and Mia is exemplary: she attends a concert by the Messengers; the house is packed, Seb’s in the spotlight playing a brief solo, then Keith starts to sing and the audience goes wild. The funk begins, the backup singers start to sing, four dancers take the stage in front of Seb, he plays a keyboard that lights up as he fingers it, the audience is exultant—and Mia looks around her in bewilderment, as if wondering: They all look like they’re really enjoying this—am I supposed to be enjoying this, too? It’s exactly how I felt while watching this denatured movie.
Chazelle’s cinematic unconscious may well have built this element of self-aware self-doubt into the fabric of the film. When Seb meets, grudgingly, with Keith to discuss the offer, the bandleader takes Seb to task, charging that he is killing jazz: “You’re so obsessed with Kenny Clarke and Thelonious Monk—these guys were revolutionaries. How are you going to be a revolutionary if you’re such a traditionalist? You’re holding onto the past, but jazz is about the future.” Chazelle is indeed that nostalgist, packing the film with explicit references and nudging allusions to classic movies (“Rebel Without a Cause,” “Singin’ in the Rain”) and classic jazz (including a glimpse of Watts Towers, which Chazelle shows from the same angle at which it appears on the jacket of “Harold in the Land of Jazz”) without providing an original gloss on the cinematic tropes or musical styles that he venerates. (That irony may be amplified in Seb’s goal of running a jazz club—of presenting the work of others whom he may know to be better musicians—but the movie leaves the idea utterly unexplored.)
Chazelle’s classics skip a few generations; he films as if nothing of importance has happened since the nineteen-sixties—the age when artists overturned conventions and shattered the bonds of classicism. He venerates and celebrates bygone methods and mannerisms because he applies them like formulas—and those formulas take the place of original creation, of a spontaneous sense of style and a natural, personal sense of beauty. One pernicious myth arising around the release and praise of “La La Land” (which the New York Film Critics Circle, of which I’m a member, picked as Best Picture last week) is that it represents some sort of return of the musical to relevance, even to greatness. In fact, great modern musicals aren’t hard to find—for instance, the best movie of 2015, “Chi-Raq,” was a musical. Whether “Jersey Boys” or “Magic Mike” and “Magic Mike XXL” or quasi-musicals such as “Black Swan” or “Damsels in Distress” or, yes, “Somewhere,” the genre continues to spark directorial imagination and achievement. There’s even more verve in the musical parodies of “Popstar” than in the strenuous emptiness, forced whimsy, and programmed emotion of “La La Land.”
