Damien Chazelle loves art. He loves the act of creation, he loves the romanticism of the artist's life, he loves the tension which exists between the artist and the world, the struggle of balancing the creation of art with the creation of a product which can be commodified, the tension between the artist and the art itself, which demands dedication and seriousness and sacrifice. Chazelle, like few other mainstream American directors, recognizes and digs into the filthy depths of what it means to make art, and what it looks and feels like when one wants to make art but doesn't have the guts, and the luck, to see it through. He explored all of this with great directness and ferocity in Whiplash. La La Land is his follow-up to that astonishing breakout, and in many ways, it is the same story told as a diptych. He flexes his newly minted cinematic muscles immediately upon the film's opening, nearly bragging in Tarantino-esque fashion that his lavish production will be presented in CINEMASCOPE before proceeding to preface his narrative with a massive, one-take musical extravaganza that, despite only being narrowly involved with the story at hand, presents one of Chazelle's theses as bluntly as possible: movies are really cool.
This sounds dismissive, but ultimately it gets at where Chazelle's interests lie, and where he is both limited and deeply skilled as a filmmaker and storyteller. Whiplash works on predominately one level, insofar as it chooses to depict, as viscerally as possible, what it means to aspire to artistic greatness. Miles Teller, amazing in the movie (though frequently overshadowed by J.K. Simmons' terrifying and genius performance), isn't really playing a human being, he's playing a vehicle--Chazelle uses his body, often abstractly, to depict a concept--sacrifice, dedication, greatness--surging outwardly from soul to body. The result, particularly in the film's masterful conclusion, is a universalization of a particular and rare thing: plain, artistic accomplishment, and, paired with Simmons' role throughout but especially in the ending, the pure artistic collaboration that cultivates this accomplishment.
Chazelle still uses actors as vehicles in La La Land. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, both skilled in their own ways, portray characters that are occasionally relatable and engaging, but their respective arcs, and especially their romance, are more window dressing than compelling stories to latch onto. When Chazelle stages a pair of disparate dance sequences between the pair--one before they are a couple, one as they become one--he does so more as a statement of an ideal than as an attempt to tell a single story. In the former, a playful little tap-off between the characters depicts a battle of wills and wits, their multiple prior meet-cutes cleverly transformed from humorous verbal jousts to subtle, gently choreographed ebbs and flows, the pair dancing around each other, attracted then repelled then attracted, rarely touching but ever gravitating around each other, one showing off then passing off to the other. In their next dance, their mutual affection for one another grown across just a few minutes of shared screentime overall, they fantastically waltz among the stars at Griffiths Observatory, and, smartly, Chazelle bathes them in shadow--whereas they once merely danced around each other (literally and figuratively), now they appear and move as one. It is a dazzling, clever depiction of the early stages of a romance; again, Chazelle flexing his muscles, using his much grander budget and the benefit of sophisticated choreography and a gorgeous score to do in just two sequences what many romances struggle to do in their entire length.
But the scenes which surround these sequences, and particularly the middle act which handles this romance dramatically, point to Chazelle's real interest. Less than a relationship or a collaboration, Chazelle's script entails a kind of manifesto, and Gosling and Stone's characters are mouthpieces for it. The things Chazelle wants to explore, which includes, as in Whiplash, the sacrifices that have to be made in order to achieve greatness, don't require that their romance be substantive or deep, they only require that it exist as a contrivance for the sake of depicting, ultimately, a number of abstract notions: that some artists accomplish more than others arbitrarily, that artistic accomplishment can come at the cost of those we care about, and, perhaps most pointedly, that sometimes artistic accomplishment is not as fulfilling as we expect it to be.
This last point Chazelle explores in a masterful homage to 40s musicals, my own predilections particularly pointing me toward Singin' in the Rain's Broadway melody sequence. Sparing too much detail, it suffices to say that the sequence builds on the film's entire narrative and reframes all of it in the microcosm of a single musical sequence, and again, it becomes clear what Chazelle values most: the cinematic image as the incarnation of an idea, rather than as a means to explore a psychology or a story. The sequence is like a film in the film, itself already self-consciously a film knowing it's a film (*exhale*), and it provides an alternative to what has preceded it; but its meaning to its characters is strange and ambiguous and, ultimately, kind of empty. This doesn't necessarily speak to a fault of the film, though it does beg the question why Chazelle chose this particular story, and its particular trajectory, to explore these ideas--it begs this question, at least, until you realize, perhaps, that Chazelle is himself inspired by The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, another classic musical that has a similar narrative but does, unlike Chazelle, interest itself in psychology as much as it does spectacle.
This is Chazelle's dilemma, and, again, it is reminiscent of Tarantino--deeply indebted to the cinema which birthed it, his film stands on shaky ground when attempting to operate independently, an issue his Whiplash suffered less from because of its partial autobiographical, and therefore fresh and original, basis. Because of this La La Land is often emotional without pointing exactly to why it's emotional; manipulative in the classic sense, and effectively so, a testament to the fact, probably to Chazelle's delight, to the power of pure cinematic spectacle, independent of what this spectacle points towards. You are affected by it because it speaks to something fundamental, not because you are psychologically attached to what is occurring. But it results in a movie partially bloated by the necessity of building up its contrived romance, when it might have succeeded more handily with less drama and more music.
Ryan Gosling, an exemplar of the actor as an abstract since Drive, has an easier time shouldering this burden; we are used to seeing Ryan Gosling as a statuesque symbol, and he balances this primary use of his talents with the more basic demands of the script with an expected ease. He's charming, and compelling, despite never really feeling completely human. Emma Stone, quite good and sometimes great in the musical sequences, suffers more outside of these moments, occasionally relatable in a basic, fundamental way, insofar as everyone wants to live up to their dreams, but for the most part reduced to a cliche of Hollywood ambition, whose arc is driven too much by the romance to register once it needs to be about what it's ostensibly really about (success, talent, the drive to dream, etc.)
So back to the opening sequence--"movies are really cool"--the success of La La Land comes, then, in spite of a great deal of Chazelle's efforts to craft a classical Hollywood romance in this more intellectual or elementally aesthetic exercise. He is a lover of movies, but in staging a massive, traditionalist tribute to their power, he inadvertently depicts where they can easily fail. Fortunately, his immense technical talents often easily trump this fact, and even in the movie's most contrived moments, the charm and excitement and beauty of his enterprise envelop the faultier, phonier aspects of his project in a cloak of pure aesthetic bliss. It's not Singin' in the Rain, but few movies are, and it's satisfying enough that such a nerd for art and movies and dreams is handily taking part in the slow but sure effort to bring one of the great genres of Hollywood history back from the dead.