La La Land (2016)

LA LA LAND  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Damien Chazelle 
    Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Rosemarie DeWitt,
    John Legend, Callie Hernandez, Jessica Rothe, 
    Sonoya Mizuno, Terry Walters, J.K. Simmons
In my whole life, I've never spent more than a few days in Los Angeles. It was a long time ago, and what I mostly remember is that the air was unbreathable and just about everybody I met there seemed phony. I know that's an absurdly small sample to go by, and a terribly unfair way to judge a city and its people, but the fact remains that I'm not a big fan of Los Angeles. Artifice is part of the deal there, of course. It's where movies get made, and movies are the art of getting people to believe, or at least imagine, stuff that's completely unreal. "La La Land" is a movie that, starting with its title and its opening production number, doesn't even make a pretense of hiding that artifice. It stars Ryan Gosling as a struggling jazz pianist and Emma Stone as an aspiring actress who meet, fall in love, break into song when the moment suggests it, and dance on the stars. It's a romantic fantasy about two intensely creative people chasing their dreams, struggling to get by and trying to make a relationship work, and, finally, it's about the transcendence of art. The key scene comes toward the end. He's on stage at the piano in a club and she's in the audience, listening. He plunks out a simple melody, something he wrote, and it's their song, the song that connects them, and for the first time she sees, and we see, everything his music exists to express. It's a throwback to the extended ballet sequences at the end of a Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly movie, and a magical moment all its own. If none of this is especially deep, well, neither were those Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly movies, and anyway, it's Los Angeles, and L.A. on screen has never looked more appealing. I'd still never want to move there, but I was fine, for a couple of hours, living in this movie.