Aaron Michael’s review published on Letterboxd:
Ended up with a free ticket to see this again!
It's become increasingly clear to me upon rewatching this that La La Land is actually a lot harder to work out than people want it to be. I think people want it to either be a story about following your dreams or a story about falling in love. On top of this, there are a lot of really reductive arguments floating around that claim that La La Land is a movie about a white guy trying to save jazz. This strikes me as a really flimsy argument.
Nonetheless, what's impressive about this movie to me is the way it takes on our notions about what it means to be happy and successful. The movie doesn't necessarily posit that these things are mutually exclusive. However, I think it does wager that, depending on your choices, you may be more happy than you are successful or more successful than you are happy.
I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about this. He said he didn't like it all that much because "it advocates for choosing your career over love." This struck me because I feel it advocates the complete opposite - if Mia and Seb had been willing to compromise on their dreams ever so slightly, to try just a little less for success, then there would have been room in each others lives for one another. So I think one's enjoyment of the film really lies in the interpretation of that final sequence.
Ultimately, it's nice to have a movie in 2016/2017 that advocates for following your dreams, loving who you love, and dreaming bigger than people think you should.
A couple points I'd like to get on the record:
- I don't understand the "Seb mansplains jazz" thing. Doesn't he talk about his passion after talking to her about her own passions? Is that not what one does in a blossoming relationship?
- If your problem is race in this movie, I get it. It's white. It's especially cringy in the scenes where Seb is playing in a club that's filled with people of POC and we're just focusing on Mia and Seb. On the other hand, the movie really only has two characters. The one real black character is actually the successful one of the group. Moreover, half the movie is spent showing how unsuccessful and unsustainable Seb's fetishization of jazz really is, so I don't understand "white savior" arguments.
- Chazelle's direction is really, really strong, regardless of whether you like the content of the film.
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