Not so much La La Land as Blah Blah Bland

Stone and Gosling perform A Lovely Night

The movie musical is Hollywood’s gift to the world. It is studio film making at its best, the absolute zenith of what some decry peevishly as ‘industrial film making’. The Hollywood studio musical is the perfect marriage of form and comment to create a product which, at its best, is genuinely transcendent.

The studio most associated with the musical is MGM and in the hands of geniuses – and I do not use the word lightly – such as Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Vincente Minnelli, Arthur Freed, and Stanley Donen – they elevated the genre to cinematic art. I accept that Astaire’s best work was possibly done in his formative years at RKO but it was MGM that provided a huge canvas to display his incomparable talent.

Films such as Easter Parade (1948), Show Boat (1951), Kiss Me Kate (1953), and, of course, Singin’ in the Rain (1952) were glorious celebrations of song and dance. These were extravagant, vivacious, larger than life experiences guaranteed to lift the gloomiest of spirits. It’s no coincidence that the first golden age of the movie musical emerges at the height of the Great Depression; the joy of the musical provided some communal relief from the misery of the real world.

This lengthy preamble is by way of providing context for my disappointment with La La Land, Damien Chazelle’s attempt to recreate the musical for the modern era. For me, the film is ridiculously overpraised and reminds me of Dr Johnson’s famous quote about dogs walking on their hind legs; it’s not done especially well but it is a miracle that it is done at all.

La La Land is a location musical set against the backdrop of modern Hollywood with a backward glance to the golden era. It’s the story of two young people, Mia (Emma Stone), a wannabe actress, and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a jazz musician who wants to follow his dream and open his own musically pure jazz club. The film charts the journey of their relationship as the success they crave threatens to tear them apart.

All of this is done to the accompaniment of, if I’m honest, a fairly modest selection of songs and some unimaginative dance numbers. The big set piece opening number Another Day of Sun sets the tone, it’s an uninspired routine on a gridlocked motorway fly over which for all its efforts lacks the energy and joie de vivre you might expect from  a number like this. Director Damien Chazelle apparently fretted over where this piece should fit in the film and it shows; it doesn’t work where it is and I’m not sure it would work anywhere.

I think part of the problem is that generally we have forgotten how to make movies like this. I’m certain, for example, that there are one or two dancers in this number who can be seen waiting for their cue and looking straight into the camera. We no longer have the grace or elegance that characterised the work of say Stanley Donen or Jacques Demy. I mention Demy because this seems to owe more to his work than it does the big studio musicals.

Chazelle seems to me to be channelling Demy, the narrative structure comes from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and the colour palette from Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967); both magnificent pieces which manage to be inspired by an original while at times surpassing it. La La Land for me doesn’t even come close, it’s a knock-off of a tribute act, at best a second generation copy.

There is a general lack of performance from Stone and Gosling. They are both fine actors but here the people they play are insipid and characterless. This is a musical which, in defiance of convention, actually manages to be smaller than life. No matter how you dress it up they can’t sing or dance so there is no performative voice. I’m not interested in whether or not Gosling learned to play the piano for this film; I’m told he did but don’t necessarily believe it. What I want is for him to look as if he can play the piano and, more important, look as if he’s enjoying it.

The same goes for the dancing. I don’t want to see Emma Stone slip out of heels and into pumps before the start of the dance number, A Lovely Night. For one thing it reminds me I’m watching a movie which I don’t want to happen, and specifically it reminds me that Ginger Rogers did all of this much better while, in her own words, ‘going backwards and in heels’.

Mia and Sebastian are insipid and characterless. Even if Stone and Gosling weren’t so preoccupied with singing and dancing the script gives them nothing to play; the characters, like their singing, are strictly one note. I don’t often do this but to see how you can bring genuine emotion and musical craft to a romantic sequence look at this heartbreaker from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg featuring Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo.

In the end La La Land isn’t an especially bad film, it’s just a bit ordinary. We haven’t seen anything like this for a while so we think it’s better than it is, but I can’t see it lingering long in the cinematic annals.