La La Land, and why creative freedom matters

Damien Chazelle and Justin Hurwitz broke records (and convention) when they released La La Land. Not only is it a musical, which, despite Hamilton's insane success, feels more and more like a dying mainstream medium, it's an original movie musical with completely original music, which, outside of animated Disney films, is an almost unheard of Hollywood gamble. Then, it went on to receive 14 Oscar nominations, a feat that hadn't been achieved since 1997's Titanic. Although it very famously did not win Best Picture, it still took home 6 awards—including Best Director.

Besides this sounding like a movie made in Janet heaven (I mean, it is), what gives? What makes this movie so special?

La La Land is and was a huge gamble, for a multitude of reasons. Not only is it an original movie musical, but it also subverts the expectation of what happens in a movie about two struggling artists who fall in love while pursuing their dreams. They give each other their strength and encourage each other to succeed, but in the end, to achieve their dreams, they're better off apart than they are together. They become a beautiful footnote in each other's lives.

No relationship can last forever. But in the magic and beauty of storytelling, we want to suspend our belief and, for just a few hours, live in the promise of forever. If art is a reflection of life and society, and romantic comedies serve as hopeful escapism, then La La Land is a painful and beautiful reminder that life does not always end the way we want it to.

It grabs us by the collar and makes us look at the truth: just because you're in the right place at the right time to make a relationship happen doesn't mean you're in the right place at the right time to make the relationship work. Life has too many other cards at play.

Chazelle brilliantly frames this against a couple most of Hollywood already knows and loves, bringing an additional layer of familiarity and connection to the characters of Mia and Sebastian. He described Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone—who had previously starred as romantic opposites in Crazy, Stupid, Love and Gangster Squad—as "the closest thing we have right now to an old Hollywood couple, like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn or Fred and Ginger or Myrna Roy and Dick Powell." It makes the tragedy that their love does not endure sting even more by the surprising reveal 15 minutes to the end of the film.

This reveal was, in fact, so surprising, that a member of the audience in my theater let out an involuntary, "Oh hell no," as soon as he saw Mia taking care of a baby with another man. It was the only phrase spoken by an audience member during the entire running time of the movie.

It's a surprise, because it's an ending that Hollywood doesn't like. The art too closely imitates the life that many want to escape for two hours by disappearing into somebody else's. In fact, it's an ending that Hollywood desperately tried hard to change. La La Land premiered in 2016, but its screenplay had been written by Chazelle in 2010. Studio after studio turned down Chazelle and composer Hurwitz, until finally, Focus Features agreed to make the film at a budget of $1 million. (The film would later be produced for a total budget of $30 million.) The caveat? Cut the opening number, make Sebastian a rock star instead of a jazz musician, and give the audience a happy ending for god's sake.

Chazelle recognized all of these things as the elements that made La La Land special, so he refused the offer and instead created Whiplash in 2014, starring Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons (who came back to cameo in La La Land). Whiplash, although not a huge commercial success, was a huge critical success. It earned a 93% rating on my film bible, Rotten Tomatoes, and was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture. It took home four of the six awards, including J.K. Simmons for Best Supporting Actor.

After Whiplash's success, Chazelle and Hurwitz were finally able to create the musical they had been dreaming of—including the four-minute, single-shot opening number that was part of their original pitch.

They created a movie that mixes the mundane with the fantastical—like turning bumper-to-bumper, stand-still Los Angeles traffic into an energetic musical number. They are in no denial about what their film is or isn't. It's an homage to LA: a city that has no inherent beauty within itself, but within the people who call the city home. It's a city of a million dreamers.

It's an homage to musical movies of old, celebrating names and traditions that have revolutionized the medium. Chazelle named some of them himself—the iconic Fred and Ginger, the inimitable Gene Kelly. La La Land brings glamor back to a forgotten time of Hollywood, when original movie musicals reigned supreme in studio offerings, award nominations, and box office numbers. It reminds us that these times are not so far away as enthusiasts may have feared—the medium just needs new life breathed into it.

It's a film that revels in spectacle. It captures the feeling of falling in love, coloring it akin to floating among stars, because that's often exactly what it feels like. You find yourself swept up in a person, and you take off, trusting that they'll come with you on the journey. We get the opportunity to feel and see through a dreamy sequence in Griffith Observatory what it's like to take those first steps of a new relationship that begin with trepidation and uncertainty and end up swirling with intoxicating breathlessness. Even if it may not have a happy ending, it's a story we take with us to the grave.

Most central to its core, it's a film that tells of the pain and uncertainty of being an artist—the compromises we make to make our passion more than just a hobby. I couldn't have been the only wet eye in my seat when Mia made her final plea to Sebastian.

“Because maybe I'm not good enough... Maybe I’m one of those people that has always wanted to do it, but it’s like a pipe dream for me. You know, and then you, you said it. You change your dreams and then you grow up. Maybe I’m one of those people, and I’m not supposed to. And I can go back to school, and I can find something else that I’m supposed to do. ‘Cause I left to do that. And it's been six years and I don't want to do it anymore.”

Mia does get her dream. But she also loses out on a love story that could have been from one of the greatest loves of her life. Life forces her to compromise. She finds a happy ending, but she also loses another.

By the end of the film, it's hard to know which ending would have been better for our star-crossed lovers. They've both found their individual happiness: Mia, with her stardom as a famous actress, and Sebastian with the founding of his own, personal jazz club. As they meet eyes from across the club and see the potential their love could have had flashing before them, you know this is a love story neither will soon forget. But the song ends, Mia cues her husband to leave, and they both wander back off to the lives they worked so hard to achieve without the person who played an influential role in inspiring them to succeed.

La La Land ought to be a study in the importance of creative freedom. Chazelle and Hurwitz were shrewd enough to understand what made their idea so compelling, and optimistic enough to hope that they could make that vision come to life, without taking the shortcuts or the compromises the world tells us we need to make in order to achieve success.

In the end, they created a beautiful film that spoke to the hearts of many by defying the patterns many films before it have set, because sometimes, not getting what you want is exactly what you need.