Weekend Watch: ‘La La Land’ Is Ready for Its Second Life, Post-Oscar Hype

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For all its gaudy excesses, I tend to think of the Academy Awards as a general good. More people get to hear about good movies that wouldn’t normally be able to reach the people the Oscars reach. Good work (on balance) gets rewarded. Art gets to be celebrated on par with athletics for at least one night a year. It’s a good thing. Most of the time. But the Oscars weren’t all that good for a movie like La La Land. I’m not talking about the Best Picture mix-up that caused a handful of producers the embarrassment of having ultimate victory snatched out of their hands in front of a worldwide audience. I’m fairly confident they weathered that one okay. But in terms of general artistic appreciation, La La Land suffered from constantly having to live up to too-high expectations. They were the Oscar frontrunner from early fall, swept the Golden Globes, and got a record-tying 14 Oscar nominations. When stacked up against the irresistible underdog story of the surprising, phenomenal Moonlight (a better movie than La La Land, to be sure), Damien Chazelle’s film was always going to come across more slick, more glossy, and less substantial than it otherwise would have.

Which is why I’m excited for La La Land to kick off its second life as a post-Oscar movie, which starts right now as it’s available to rent on VOD. Without the weight of a Best Picture trophy, it can now float a little more freely (which is good, because floating on air is exactly what this movie does best). It’s a movie that succeeds in moments and flourishes, in pops of color and bursts of banter. There’s no shortage of ways to pick the details apart — the middle portion drags; Seb and Mia’s breakup feels perfunctory; they really could have used some supporting characters — but the heights it reaches are uncommonly high.

Having first experienced La La Land on the happier side of the awards-season tempest, I was happily surprised at how quickly I was able to re-surrender myself to the film’s charms. From the opening, admittedly critic-baiting Cinemascope animation, Chazelle kicks off his film with the kind of confidence one imagines you’d need to be able to put together a contemporary musical film from original material. When he and the film’s stars would talk during awards season about what a difficult prospect it was to get this film through the studio system, there was a lot of glib scoffing about how hard it was to get financing for a movie about beautiful white people in a self-aggrandizing Hollywood setting. But in 2017 Hollywood, La La Land isn’t remotely what’s being pushed as far as spectacle filmmaking goes. Studios want established properties, name brands, tentpoles, and franchises. There was no name value to La La Land beyond its stars, and nothing to sell the film besides its confident vibe and the advance raves of critics. We might get musicals and we might get movies that lionize Hollywood, but we decidedly don’t get movies like La La Land anymore.

The opening number, “Another Day of Sun,” is so fabulously addictive, I immediately started the movie over again so I could watch it twice (welcome to your life on VOD, La La Land; we’re in charge of the editing now). It’s not only a big, sweeping, creative endeavor, staging a big song-and-dance number in L.A. traffic, but like many things about La La Land, it’s doing more than you realize. For one thing, it’s far more wry about the Hollywood experience than its “City of Dreams, YEAH!” facade might suggest. Which could be said of the whole movie, actually, including Seb’s much-derided obsession with jazz and the authenticity found therein.

The central romance between Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone’s characters is both the film’s core strength and its most frequent weakness. Gosling and Stone obviously have phenomenal chemistry together, lighting up the screen in even the most banal interactions. Which only makes it more frustrating when the middle portion of the film sags under the weight of a paint-by-numbers story arc. We spend a little too much time on the details of Seb’s jazz dreams and too little time fleshing out the particulars of Mia’s acting dreams, and while Stone brings it home in gorgeous fashion with her performance of “Audition (The Fools Who Dream),” her ascension to stardom by the film’s end feels only about half-earned.

Still, what an ending! As he did in Whiplash, Chazelle is able to hopscotch past all the nagging details and narrative shortcuts into a finale that is confident to the point of cocky about its ability to sweep its audience along. And he’s been right both times! While Whiplash managed to pull things together in its final instant, La La Land pulls the audience along on an entire denouement, giving us exactly what we want, followed by exactly what his story needs. It’s a touching, melancholy note that ends the film as beautifully as it began.

As we move ahead, into 2017 and beyond, with a new class of Oscar movies waiting in the wings to cycle through the system again, here’s hoping that these are the things we end up taking away from La La Land, an imperfect but still deeply special movie that should be able to stand on its own without comparison for years to come.

Where to stream La La Land