Review: LA LA LAND

Funny thing about musicals is that if you put them in a different format no one thinks of them as musicals. Frozen or Aladdin are thought of as animations or kids movies but they are stuffed with songs. When it's live action like Grease or Chicago everyone wants it to be innovative or subversive, never just a musical. Lars von Trier made a near Dogme one with Dancer in the Dark (the genre alone would have disqualified it but the look and dialogue were on the money). Chicago played Broadway for the MTV generation cutting all the fluidity out of the dancing with more edits than the human eye could register. And anyway, apart from a few rogue entries, musicals seemed to have died off after the big 60s bubble, recalled for their kitsch value and then their irony value and then the kitsch of their irony or the other way around. Why do one now?

La La Land doesn't promise much beyond genre and keeps to that lack of promise. Sounds like faint praise but read on. We open (after some cute jokes about technicolor and cinemascope) on a jammed L.A. freeway, closing in on a beautiful young woman in a car who's dubba dubba-ing a tune which turns into a big opening song and dance about the eternal sunshine of Los Angeles. The song itself is generic to the point that it needs nothing memorable in the melody or much or the lyric. It's big and loud and colourful and kinetic. It's an opening number which ends on a genuinely amusing note of bathos and the rom com element's meet cute.

Emma Stone is distracted from the traffic by the lines she will be reading in the audition she is driving to. Ryan Gosling can't get the cassette (yep, cassette) in his dashboard to cue at the right spot but when the traffic starts to move again he baaaaaarmps the horn in Emma's ear, overtaking her with a contemptuous sneer. In 1936 when we saw Fred and then Ginger we started following them from the get go. In 2016 this musical also gives us two movie stars and we do the same for them. We're soon to see some developmental dialogue, visual quotes from earlier eras of the genre and so on and the songs will get more character and narrative based. Bring the two together, prise them apart and then bring them back together stronger than ever. End.

With some variations that's what you get. If you don't like that this won't convert you but the curious cinema goer might well feel rewarded by taking the chance in this case. This is a rom com with the theme of following dreams vs sticking at more realistic drudge jobs. The reason you might care about this has a lot to do with that casting. Apart from an early scene between Sebastian (Gosling) and his sister which can't rise above it's old school dialogue about being a serious artist, the central pair put all their more typical dramatic chops into these roles to warm up what might have legitimately been vessels for song and dance numbers. The dramatic and comedic two-plays work well and both get their moments at breakout performance.

The trouble is that the second act sags without strong numbers as we live through the origins of the conflict and it is here that we might have softened the determination to appear like a legit drama between songs and created something more convincing for confidently joining the rest of the musical. As soon as we accept these young A-listers as musical actors we're happy following them through that. Why have such a lengthy dialogue about conflicting lives when a song would have lifted it into compulsion? We know Gosling and Stone can drama how wonderful to have seen them sing it (as they already, creditably had).

The third act lifts itself ably and when director Chazelle (of the compelling Whiplash) amps up the cinema it feels worth the wait. Here we have Mia (Stone) putting the kitchen sink into her audition number. The final what-if sequence, similarly is masterfully handled as the piece remembers it's a movie and can do what it wants which is best done with depth and the director's own obvious musicality.

The score deserves a plaudit for erring on the side of the jazz at Sebastian's core which even knocks on the door at more orchestrally-appropriate moments. This feels less like a tribute to Michel Legrand's masterful Umbrellas of Cherbourg than an extension of it. And we can't leave without stating that the choreography is not only always welcome when we see it but given as live as it can be without those Chicago split second cuts. Stone and Gosling really dance well and one sequence involving swapping places on a park bench rises above it own cuteness with sheer wow-factor.

While I might not see this again soon, I enjoyed it but would rather see another one with even more confidence and commitment to the genre. Now the twenty-teens homages to Singing in the Rain etc have been played out let's find something else (between this and London Street, perhaps) and forge a way. I liked musicals as a kid. They were played on the ABC on Friday nights before I had a legitimate party life at school. I still like them. This shows they can still work but let's keep going and find out what else they can do.

Top 5 musicals

Jesus Christ Superstar: A kind of flower power Jesus in the age of Vietnam with Woodstock music and a message of trouble and sacrifice. The Israel locations don't hurt either. Also, my sister had the film soundtrack double LP of this the liner notes of which introduced me to the word juxtaposition. They were referring to the blend of elements like US army helmets and homespun robes. So in closing it's worth pointing out that this film is shit hot on juxtaposition.

Fiddler on the Roof: Even though it is Jewish before it is Russian and there is a whole sequence of a dance off between the Russians and the Jews my anti-semitic-on-Sundays Russian nana loved this musical. I loved the music with its more minor keys and flattened sixths than in the entire middle east (or lower east side, more accurately). Then when I saw the movie (our LP was the cast of the stage version) everything fell into place in great style. Still love this one with its big complex 70s pallett and epic sweep. Director Norman Jewison went on to make the first of this list, using even more of his invention. I suppose if Nana had known his surname we would have had another tirade about the Choose. If she did she was being quiet about it or just too wrapped up in this great story with great music in a great movie to care. (Maybe she just found comfort in the fact that Paul Michael Glaser who went on to become tv's Starsky - Choose! Choose! - was one of those foul Bolsheviks.)

The Band Wagon: Very loopy fun as Fred Astaire joins Cyd Charisse and the dry as an Autumn leaf Oscar Levant on the road in a musical within the musical. They pitch it as being about a guy and a gal etc to a self-styled genuis director who imposes his own pet project on it, calling the idea a modern realisation of FAUST! .... in which he'll play the devil. What results is some of the most durably enjoyable song 'n' dance routines on film. My favourite when I first saw this as a kid is the proto-Ken Russell vision of the Faust sequence. Aptly, That's Entertainment was written for this one.

Cabaret: This lies more in the margin of musicals as almost all the songs are performed digetically, on stage in the cabaret itself. Every song is a stunner and there is a powerful early 70s gravity flowing and swelling beneath the story of the guy 'n' gal lost in another town. The gravity is there because the guy and gal are foreigners and the town is Berlin and the time half past Weimar.

I said almost all the songs are depicted as stage numbers but there is one exception. When two of the characters take time out for a stein in a country beirgarten the camera hones in on a beautiful young boy who begins singing something from the Sound of Music. As he approaches the middle eight the camera tracks back to reveal what kind of looks like a boy scout uniform until you see the swasitka on his arm. The song is Tomorrow Belongs to Me and even though it was written for the Broadway musical many people thought they were hearing an authentic Nazi anthem.

They can be forgiven for the thought as the song has a creepy effect. As the middle eight progresses with the boy's natural soprano we hear an undercurrent of bass voices joining him until the chorus explodes across the entire assembly and carries everyone who watches it along. It's a kind of implosion of the La Marsellaise scene in Casablanca or the end of Paths of Glory but its power, though reversed, is irresistable. We are stirred before we know why, exactly like everyone joining in on screen. Only the two friends decline to join, and one saddened old man who keeps his seat amid the hysteria while he recalls the last time his fellow Germans got this excited ended in mass death and the humilation of Versailles. Well, here they are again and everyone humming and shouting along will in a very few years be losing children, neighbours, lovers, their own lives and/or get involved in much much much worse.

This is the strongest scene I've known from any musical. I'm even getting chills recalling it here. And that's just one scene from this film of powerful scenes and showstoppers. Michael York could not have been better cast as the stand-in Christopher Isherwood. Liza Minelli who had already started a decent screen career which would continue for decades provides a surprising centre of gravity while reamaining lighter than a flapper.

Gigi: A great big musical explosion of Collette, Hollywood style. Leslie Caron, a kind of Audrey Hepburn imagined by Jacques Brel, lights up the screen as the young beauty in bloom about to enter high society. Louis Jourdain has a great time shooting down everyone of his uncle's pleas for the joie de printemps by singing, "it's a bore!" His uncle, the ocean-liner elegant Maurice Chevalier, sings Thank 'eaven for Little Girls, a song of such inflammable criminality that the attempt to redeem it at the eleventh hour with a twisty final line fails to erase what we've just borne witness to. I say high society but Gigi is not a debutante as such. She's, in fact, much more of ... a ... Oh, courtesan, the word is courtesan. Gigi is a big lavish Hollywood musical about a courtesan. You'd be forgiven for thinking she's headed for a rom-com-in-fancy-dress marriage but really she's going to be kept (in high style, sure, but kept all the same). Despite all that my favourite bit is when she's shown how to eat quail and talk with her mouth full.