La La Land: City of Stars, Why Are You
Shining Just for Standard-Issue White People?
Reviewed by Karthik Purushothaman
Damien Chazelle, “La La Land”
Summit Entertainment
2016, 128 minutes, Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD, $14.96
How do you criticize a film that admittedly takes place in “La La Land,” where a rush hour traffic jam is a chance for drivers to break away from their respective music tastes, as though America’s ethnic groups are united by a love for the “West Side Story”-styled-musical? As one of only two Indians at the cinema hall in Assembly Row, Boston, I declined the escapist offer of “La La Land” when I first watched the film last December. But how could I write a critical piece about the film that’s unabashedly aware of its own solipsism? Surely writer-director Damien Chazelle’s neat script would have earned him an A-plus in any writing class.
However, I felt energized to speak against the blockbuster picture that has tugged hard at the heartstrings of critics to earn a 93 (on 100) Metascore, has garnered fourteen Academy Award nominations, and picked up some big ones ahead of films such as “Moonlight,” “Fences,” and “Hidden Figures,” among other nominated pictures more important to the current moment.
Although no one who liked “La La Land” cuffed me, shoved me into the interrogation room and chucked a steel chair at the mirror, I find the industry that has repeatedly rewarded this flighty musical guilty of intellectual and cultural domination. “But ‘La La Land’ offers more than just fantasy …” writes Michael Schulman for The New Yorker in an article called “The Oscars and The Election.” “It’s a chance for Hollywood to recast itself not as a playground of élites but as a land of underdogs, where any dreamy-eyed kid can make it big.”
Is it though? Isn’t a musical in which all songs sound like they were written for Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers, ignoring the disparities that surround present-day musical preferences, guilty of its own kind of elitism? Whether it be Chopin or Joni Mitchell or J Cole, don’t we all want on our earphones someone who speaks to us? By indulging in a diversity play involving people of skin colors as varied as their clothes during the intro routine, “La La Land” cleverly begins with a fever dream of “equality” just so from the first minute, the viewer of color would pardon the seemingly innocent picture for being entirely about white people.
Such flat, filmy ones, that too. “The idea was to take the old musical but ground it in real life, where things don’t always work out,” said Chazelle to The Hollywood Reporter. How does he say that with a straight face? Even if we have to take the terms “struggling actress” and “aspiring jazz musician” to mean by default “white,” how does Chazelle deem real the snob Sebastian, who looks Ryan Gosling’s thirty-five, but stomps around like a child while making the compromise of playing wedding, tribute, and church gigs to earn his living, which my music school grad friends in their mid-twenties deem necessary and do without fussing and fretting? How is Emma Stone’s Mia, whom neither Siri nor Google Calendar can save from showing up late for auditions wearing coffee stained shirts “real”? How is Sebastian’s and Mia’s relationship, entirely predicated upon the “jazzhole” teaching the starry-eyed actress what he believes is “jazz” (when they aren’t literally dancing with the stars at Griffith Observatory, that is) real?
Lastly, the dudes behind tunes such as “city of stars, are you shining just for me; city of stars, there’s so much that I can’t see,” can’t be serious about “grounding” the musical in reality. Has Mr. Chazelle even heard Lin Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton” soundtrack? Don Cheadle’s surreal take on Miles Davis, “Miles Ahead” also came out in 2016, and the same year the makers of the indie film “Nina” were criticized for using “blackface” on lead actress Zoe Saldana until she achieved the complexion (but never the complexity) of the enigmatic Miss Simone. After idolizing Charlie “the Bird” Parker in his first film (“Whiplash,” 2014) and after covering extensively in “La La Land” an old LA jazz club in which Miles Davis supposedly played, where does Chazelle get off, never once discussing race in jazz music?
Here, “La La Land” does pack a pleasant surprise in musician John Legend, who appears on screen for a few minutes as the “sellout” Keith, an old classmate who fronts a band that uses samplers and puts Sebastian behind a synth. Is there clearer evidence of Chazelle’s snobbery than in the caricature he makes Keith out to be? Is Keith, who sounds as overproduced as the teen idols on the radio today, how Chazelle sees contemporary artists such as Robert Glasper, D’Angelo or the big band Snarky Puppy? The Oscar-nominated writer-director cleverly tries to downplay the problem by giving Keith the punchiest line in his film. Turning towards a disgruntled Sebastian after a marketing event, the pragmatic and level-headed Keith asks: “how are you going to be a revolutionary if you’re such a traditionalist?”
I fear there’s something other than “traditionalism” at play in Mr. Chazelle’s act of discrediting jazz’s evolution into funk and hip-hop, a genre whose seeds were sown by post-civil-rights jazz poets such as Gil Scott Heron (“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”), for which reason I’m astonished at his soulless film’s universal acclaim. “The New Yorker’s” Richard Brody, one of the rare few critics who didn’t partake in “La La Land”’s postcard pleasures, said: “[Chazelle] films as if nothing of importance has happened since the 1960s— the age when artists overturned conventions and shattered the bonds of classicism.” Many subjectivities have emerged since and asserted their significance; the term “American” now refers to a larger, more diverse group of people. So, when Chazelle proclaims that “older musicals are timeless and it has a way to do with their simplicity,” I worry that his definition of “simplicity” is an oversimplification along the lines of “American greatness” as defined by a brand of red hats.
Karthik Purushothaman hails from Chennai, India, and moved to the United States in August 2015 to pursue the creative writing MFA degree at William Paterson University of New Jersey. His work has appeared or will appear in Rattle, The Common, The Puritan, The Hollins Critic, and Indian Literature, Sahitya Akademi’s bimonthly English-language journal.