Q: Is abuse an acceptable/effective form of motivation?Īs a particularly soft-spoken educator, the question interests me. In all three of the director’s features, his protagonists have been jazz musicians struggling to find validation from those around them-and Whiplash and La La Land are especially interested in the lengths an artist will go (or should go) in order to be appreciated.ĭamien Chazelle’s last film, Whiplash, is a relatively simple story about a young drummer who accepts constant abuse from a domineering instructor in his quest for all-time greatness, and it presents a disturbing, but laser-focused dramatization of a very specific question: Rather than making a simple song-and-dance piece designed to make an audience happy (is it fair to say this was the fundamental goal of the archetypal musical?), Chazelle is interested in exploring the ethics of art. On the surface, La La Land has all of the Hollywood sensibility and musical ambition to warrant that view, but his goals are ultimately elsewhere. Or at least it should be…but Damien Chazelle is not interested in making a movie that is all style and effusive emotion. It is, in a word, romantic, in a way that this year has decidedly not been, and it feels like exactly the rush of euphoria needed in a world absolutely drained of energy and optimism.
This is a bubbly, tap-dancing love story that sets one dance number in quintessentially-Californian stalled traffic and another in the iconic cosmic observatory from Rebel Without a Cause. Like many awards contenders before it, La La Land is in love with Hollywood’s Golden Age, and gives its audience an obvious visual understanding of how the era earned its name.
It’s easy to see why this is so praised: the film is joyously energetic, unabashedly sentimental, and awash in vibrant primary colors that pop off the screen. Of all 2016’s critical darlings, the rare original musical La La Land is perhaps beloved most of all, with any outlying detractors being dismissed as “more-disaffected-than-thou film twitter bros” who decided to hate it before watching.
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