Well Scott, are you Ga Ga over La La Land?

We’re introduced to bright and emerging actress Mia (Emma Stone). She is trying out for a number of movies and has big dreams of becoming a movie star. But first she must work in the movie studio’s coffee shop as a barista. She goes to a restaurant at Christmastime where she hears a young Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) playing a piano. Things aren’t going so well for young Sebastian as he is summarily fired for not playing holiday standards.

The opening scene of La La Land is a massive production number where all the (young) drivers in Los Angeles’ gridlock get out of their cars and sing and dance. This is a promise that we’re in for a classic musical ala the 1940’s. But it is a promise that will soon be broken as the leads in this story really don’t sing or dance very much. And when they do it is the minimum necessary. La La Land is a huge disappointment.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if that were the only flaw. But this movie fails on every level. Musical: the songs are abandoned at about the 25% point. Dance: Stone and Gosling barely perform – I’ve seen better work on TV’s Dancing with the stars. Plot: This is a hackneyed story that has little depth. Jazz: Gosling’s thing is that he wants everyone to love Jazz. And by the end of the story we don’t care one wit about Jazz. It’s a story full of promises that are never delivered upon.

I had no problem with these characters as the leads – except that there was nothing particularly interesting about them. Gosling did a good job as the jazz pianist – apparently playing the piano himself in scenes that required it. Aside from one scene where he explains jazz to Mia, we don’t really get to see his passion. And when Mia encourages him to try out for a band, he resists at first, then joins up. Apparently he had personality conflicts with the leader (played by John Legend). But we never really see these conflicts. And our hero seems to genuinely enjoy playing the “new jazz.” So it’s a bit of a surprise when he claims he only joined because Mia exhorted him to.

Likewise with Mia’s talents. Sebastian encourages Mia to stop auditioning and work on her one-woman show. Which she does and when only a handful of people show up, she decides to quit acting altogether. But then a casting agent saw the show and wants to cast Mia in a major feature. And we have the same problem again – we never saw the one-woman show. So we have no idea whether she was any good in it. The only real example of Mia’s acting we get is a monologue where she reminisces about an aunt who got a passing mention in an earlier scene. It’s truly a touching moment – possibly the only one in the film.

So I’m pretty unenthusiastic about this romantic hero pairing. There’s a lot of talk about their relative passions, but very little of it is on-screen. We just have to take their word for it. So I’ll go back to the old saw about writing – “show, don’t tell.”

Once again, as with so much in this film, the mentoring is off-camera. There was so much that was off-camera in this film I felt that I didn’t really need to be in the theater.

La La Land is a film that promised much and delivered little. Even it’s opening scrawl promised it would be a Cinemascope classic. But it pales in comparison to such classics as Singin’ in the Rain and Top Hat. Those films, even with their limited plotlines, delivered amazing songs and dance routines. “I’ve watched theatrical musicals. I met theatrical movies. Theatrical movies have been friends of mine. La La Land – you’re no theatrical musical!” I give La La Land just 2 out of 5 Reels.

The heroes in this film are flimsy and uninteresting. They scarcely have an arc that I could detect. The one saving grace is the last scene which was a “what could have been” montage. That was a welcome diversion from an otherwise ho-hum hero’s journey. I give the heroes in this film just 2 out of 5 Heroes.

And the mentoring was non-existent save for the owner of Mia’s coffee shop. 1 Mentor for her.

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