LA LA LAND Review

There are films you see and films you carry. La La Land is the second kind, one of those rare works that does not stay on the screen when the credits roll but follows you out into the parking lot and rides home with you in silence. We first saw it years ago, in a theater, and we have thought about its ending more times than we can count. Returning to it now, we wanted to know whether it holds. Whether the feeling was real or whether we had invented it in the years since, polishing the memory until it shone brighter than the thing itself.

It holds. It holds completely. And in some ways it is harder to watch the second time, because we know where it is going and we watch the characters not knowing, and that dramatic irony sits on the chest like a stone.

Returning to a beloved film is always a negotiation between who you were when you first saw it and who you are now. La La Land won both rounds.

What strikes us most on this revisit is how honest the film is underneath all its beauty. It is easy to remember La La Land as a confection, all primary colors and swooping cameras and two gorgeous people dancing under artificial stars. And it is those things. Linus Sandgren's cinematography is still ravishing, the blue that looks the way longing feels. The Griffith Observatory sequence still makes us feel briefly weightless while the opening freeway number still makes us smile before it has even properly begun.

But what the years have clarified is the film's melancholy, which was always there but which we perhaps underweighted on first viewing, dazzled as we were by the spectacle. Damien Chazelle is making a film about the cost of dreaming and the quiet violence of choosing a life. He shows us the roads not taken, running parallel to the ones we are on, visible in the periphery forever. The musical numbers are not decorating this story. They are the only language adequate to its grief.

Emma Stone's audition scene, the one where she is asked to tell a story and simply tells one, is even more devastating on a second watch. The first time we saw it we were surprised by it. This time we braced for it and it still got through. That is the mark of a performance that is not doing a trick but telling a truth, something that cannot be defended against no matter how many times you see it coming.

Ryan Gosling, playing a man who loves jazz the way some people love lost causes, recedes slightly on revisit in the best possible way. He is not the film's showiest element but he is its anchor, the still point around which Stone's more volatile star orbits. Together they have a chemistry that is not quite heat but something more durable: recognition. The feeling of two people who understand each other in ways they cannot fully articulate and probably never will.

The ending does not get easier. If anything, it gets harder, because this time we grieve it in advance, frame by frame, knowing exactly what is coming, powerless to stop it.

We have talked to people who find La La Land too precious, too in love with its own references, too pleased with itself for knowing its Demy from its Minnelli. We understand the objection. The film wears its cinephilia openly and occasionally tips from homage into the kind of nostalgia that flatters the audience for recognizing things. But on this revisit those moments feel smaller than we remembered, and the genuine feeling feels larger. Chazelle is not showing off. He is building a language out of borrowed parts and then using that language to say something new.

We sat with two people falling in love in a city of dreams, watched them choose and lose as people do, and carry each other anyway. The way you carry the songs that meant something once and mean something different now and will mean something else again in ten more years.

Some films age. Some films deepen. This one deepens.

🍿 SCORE = 92/100