Saviors of 2016: Finally, La La Land

Saviors of 2016 is our series where we recap the year by discussing its most redeeming players.

The beginning of La La Land is going to push audiences toward either end of the spectrum: You’re in or you’re out. Yet, marvelously, the ending of La La Land is going to pull everyone back together. This movie’s surprising, joyous, melancholy—it runs the gamut.

La La Land is a musical about a young couple trying to live out their showbiz dreams in Los Angeles, and what’s delightful about that is how little shame it has in being what it is. The opening scene is a song and dance number. The set is awash in sunshine, and the pomp and circumstance that proceeds is as sticky and sweet as a melty ice cream cone. There’s enough dazzle to make the more unprepared moviegoers glance at the exits, it’s that in-your-face and smiley and romantic. This movie greets you like an overeager theater kid on the first day of college; it’s sort of off-putting, but you do your best to play along.

Then again, if theater’s your scene, it’s difficult to pinpoint a single moment in La La Land that you won’t like. It’s just a fun movie to watch. The songs might not be super memorable in a vacuum, but they’re all choreographed and performed with reverent precision. The characters—Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone crush as the two downtrodden leads—are funny and charming and easy to back. The colors, the sounds, the pure filmmaking on display—La La Land looks like something made with passion and love. For a movie about Los Angeles, it’s remarkable how sincere and honest it feels. The characters feel real and their problems feel significant and unexaggerated. It woos you, and you fall for it.

Throughout the year, popular culture has talked a lot about the meaning of voices. Who’s allowed to speak? What are they allowed to speak about? Who gives people the authority to speak? Who should give people the authority to speak (different question)? From this end, it seems the main societal sector raising these sorts of questions is that which contains all the young people. The 90s kids. The free-trophy generation. The—to use a word that we at According to Dazz despise with all our hearts—millennials.

When these questions on who’s allowed to speak are asked, they’re inevitably followed up by counter-questions about entitlement. Are young people entitled? What made them that way? What do they feel entitled to have? Exploring the selfishness and entitlement of millennials at this point seems like mucking through a swamp of clichés. It’s annoying and it feels cyclical.

La La Land doesn’t enter this conversation so much as shove it aside. Its main characters are two young struggling twenty-somethings, both chasing dreams that some older folk might call ill-advised, even self-centered. Yet, the movie never condemns its characters for their decisions. It presents the highs and lows, the payoffs and consequences, and lets the viewer land on either side of “was it worth it?” It’s nice that way. While you might leave the theater thinking about the costs of success or the perils of dream-chasing, you never have the sense that La La Land is shaking a finger at Gosling’s character (he wants to open a jazz club) or Stone’s (she wants to be a movie star). There’s no You shouldn’t have done that. Nope. In fact, the movie presents dream-chasing as noble, triumphant, and especially brave. For all the risk-taking it depicts, there’s a little bit of reward, too. But just a little.

That’s what makes La La Land’s ending so great. Speaking vaguely here, our final question has little to do with chasing dreams or so-called “selfish” pursuits, but has everything to do with happiness and fulfillment. It’s less “showbiz? really?” and more “showbiz? why?” The point isn’t to probe the entitlement of the characters to big dreams and lofty goals, the point is to probe why they have those goals in the first place. That’s a more interesting question. It’s rather lovely, if not at all pat.

It’s rather paradoxical, then, that a movie with such a young perspective can be packaged in such an old-fashioned container. Remember: It’s a musical! There are a few tiny hints at the present—Emma Stone’s delightfully on-brand Prius notwithstanding—but La La Land has the look and feel of a story that can be placed anywhere in time and still be resonant and truthful. It’s never dated or stamped, and going forward, that might be its smartest choice. Young people might look to this movie as a banner—it understands them, you know?—but it could’ve done the same for Generation X. Generation Z, too. It belies a clever bit of foresight in that way.

Look, La La Land isn’t some generation-defining touchstone. At its core, it’s really just a well-packaged, satisfying, harmless movie, but if you’re looking for a savior from 2016, there’s room on this lifeboat. This is a young story in a mature box. It has the lofty aspirations of a scrappy post-grad, but its themes betray an elder’s wisdom. Looking around your theater, you might see creaky seniors settling in for a day out of the house, and you might see syrupy college couples holding hands. They’ll all leave with something to talk about, something to add to the discussion. That’s a mature movie. That’s foresight. From a whole lot of song and dance, who would’ve expected this.