There are moments of pure movie magic in La La Land. I’m talking about soaring moments that completely involve the audience and take them to another place. Unfortunately, there are only moments and I’m not certain I can speak as highly for the sum of the movie’s individual parts. It’s easy to identify them; they occur when Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone appear together onscreen. When they’re apart, La La Land drags and feels overlong.
You also must know that the movie is a musical… a good, old fashioned Hollywood musical (that happens to take place, and is largely about, Hollywood). Its opening scene is an energetically choreographed dance number where drivers at a standstill on a Los Angeles freeway exit their cars and proceed to bounce off them and around them like pinballs against rubber bumpers in an arcade machine while singing about the California sun. It’s terrific.
La La Land plays with time and uses it to both reveal simultaneous events and provide alternative futures. Both struggling musician, Sebastian (Gosling), and struggling actress, Mia (Stone), are on the freeway, but we follow only Mia as she goes to work at a coffee shop on the Warner Bros. studio lot, fails an audition, goes to a party with her roommates, then stumbles into a restaurant where Sebastian is playing piano.
With her gaze on Sebastian, we whiz back to the freeway and follow him through the day and events that take him to the same restaurant and encounter with Mia. The story is told in four parts that mirror the seasons, beginning with winter, and chronicle the romantic relationship between the two characters. Then there’s an epilogue of sorts that takes place during winter, five years later. This epilogue is utterly fantastic, evoking feelings of which the entire movie only aspires.
