Escaping to La La Land, Then and Now

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/25/opinion/sunday/escaping-to-la-la-land-then-and-now.html

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In the 1930s, Hollywood studios produced more than 400 movie musicals. The total for 1936 alone was over 50, including two films (“Follow the Fleet” and “Swing Time”) starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Eighty years later, in 2016, there were all of four, which isn’t many by comparison but is three more than most of us would have guessed. “La La Land” has so dominated the theaters and the headlines that you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s the first and only movie musical to come along in years.

In their heyday, which coincided with the Great Depression, Hollywood musicals drew huge audiences looking for escapist entertainment. The success of “La La Land” at the box office, its (generally positive) reviews and its domination of the awards season, with seven Golden Globes and 14 Oscar nominations, including best director, best picture and best leading actor and actress, has prompted speculation that a revival of the genre is in store. If ever there were a moment to bring back escapist entertainment, this would seem to be it.

And yet, to hear Damien Chazelle, the director of “La La Land,” and Mandy Moore, the film’s choreographer, tell it, making a movie musical contemporary and — to use a contemporary adjective — “relatable” is not so easy. Narrating a dance scene for The Times, Mr. Chazelle contended that one of the things he loved about a lot of old musicals was “this idea that falling in love could be a very natural thing, and I say ‘natural’ — obviously, it’s a little ironic, because it’s within the context of these very unnatural musical numbers. You know, people don’t break into song like this.” It was important, Ms. Moore told The Times, that viewers “understand that these were real people and real dreamers — and that they would move in a way that felt like real people, not just trained dancers.”

There’s a vaguely apologetic undertone here, as if Mr. Chazelle and Ms. Moore are convinced that movie musicals are obsolete, even as they set out to make one. If I understand correctly, audiences today would have a hard time believing in men and women who burst into song and dance because that’s not what people do in their everyday lives — it’s not “realistic.” And we would find it difficult to identify with men and women trained to sing and dance at a professional level because we’re not.

But musicals — onstage or onscreen — aren’t realistic. That’s part of their charm. In the theater we have no problem buying into the conventions that allow them to operate according to their own rules. Founding fathers rap. Mormons do-si-do with African villagers. We happily suspend our cynicism and engage in make-believe.

It’s true that, as Mr. Chazelle implies, we take movies much more literally. Like photography, film purports to document something that’s actually happening, and what it documented in its early years was often blatantly fake. Nevertheless, the fact that musicals like “The Gay Divorcee,” “The Wizard of Oz” and “An American in Paris” are clearly taking place on a sound stage doesn’t prevent us from getting caught up in them. The artifice is right out in the open.

Over time, of course, the sleight of hand has grown increasingly sophisticated, to the point where computer-generated imaging now makes it seem as if even the most preposterous events are unfolding before our eyes. Not even “La La Land,” with its dogged adherence to plausibility, can resist the magic of C.G.I., which enables Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, the film’s lovers, to fly into the nighttime sky and dance among the twinkling constellations. If Mr. Chazelle and Ms. Moore’s concerns are correct, then we’ve reached a point where our tolerance for fantasy in film can accommodate intergalactic warriors and inhabitants of Middle-earth — or a couple waltzing across the sky — but not people who sing and dance better than we can.

“ ‘La La Land’ celebrates the amateur,” Ms. Moore contends. This sounds inclusive and egalitarian on the face of it. We’re all amateurs — Ms. Stone and Mr. Gosling are just like us, only better-looking because, you know, they’re movie stars. Expertise, which requires talent not everyone has, is elitist.

But in the end it’s hard not to conclude that this film’s premise is in fact based on a misunderstanding of how movie musicals work. When Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance together so seamlessly, we understand that it’s because they were made for each other; the music and dance catapult us into another realm in which their souls meet. When Judy Garland sings “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” it’s with a purity of tone and a sublime wistfulness that speak for us all, articulating a yearning beyond words. When, in “West Side Story,” the Jets move down a sidewalk together, their precision timing, rhythm and line demonstrate just how tight their bond is. When, in “Les Jeunes Filles de Rochefort,” Gene Kelly sings to passers-by and they dance along with him, it’s clear that his high spirits are contagious: He’s in love. When, in “My Fair Lady,” Freddy walks down the street where Eliza Doolittle lives and suddenly declaims his state of mind in a song, we’re in the song with him, knowing that only a melody could contain the excitement of being near her. None of this strikes us as ridiculous. Singing and dancing take over when talking and walking no longer suffice, communicating what can’t be said, ratcheting up the emotion.

The most touching scenes in “La La Land,” however, come not when Ms. Stone and Mr. Gosling sing or dance but when they talk. “I’m always gonna love you,” she tells him. “I’m always gonna love you, too,” he replies. Astaire didn’t tell Rogers that he loved her because he didn’t have to. She knew it — and we knew it, too — by the way they danced together.

If the dance numbers in “La La Land” fail to take the film to another level, I think it’s because they’re confined to the capabilities of ordinary people. The choreography, like the dancers themselves, lacks the virtuosity that makes professionals so thrilling to watch. Ms. Stone and Mr. Gosling, in their most romantic duet, build to … a waltz turn and a dip — steps that most couples master for their wedding reception.

And then, as if this simple combination were some pyrotechnical tour de force, we get it again, during the final fantasy sequence in which we witness what might have been. If the objective was to persuade us that Ms. Stone and Mr. Gosling had a chemistry neither will ever find with anyone else, their dancing together falls flat because it doesn’t seem to be anything special, nor does it signify anything bigger. Dancing is an activity, a hobby, something fun two people do together, but not a metaphor. “La La Land” is so intent on its own credibility that it never transcends life as we know it. In the end, we conclude that her marrying another guy is fine. So what if Mr. Gosling could dance? Her husband probably has some other skill — playing chess or scuba diving — to recommend him.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of this. Mr. Chazelle has made a charming film, if not an exhilarating one, and at 32, he is undoubtedly a better judge of his own generation than I am. In interviews, he demonstrates familiarity with and respect for the great movie musicals of the past. Is the capacity to enjoy those films predicated on being old enough to have seen them in the context of their own time?

The golden era of movie musicals was on the wane by the time my generation came along, but between repertory cinemas and cable television, we managed to catch the best of them. Their exuberance and irrepressible optimism couldn’t have been more out of step with the nightly news, dominated as it was by the Vietnam War, Watergate and skirmishes on multiple fronts in the fight for equal rights. Wearing the uniform of the counterculture — jeans and Birkenstocks — we were overcome by a collective nostalgia for the world depicted in 1930s films: its satin glamour and debonair elegance, its screwball logic and lightning repartee, its catchy tunes and corny lyrics. Busby Berkeley’s kaleidoscopic extravaganzas we embraced as camp. The 10 films that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made together set the high-water mark as masterpieces of the genre.

You could argue that Astaire and Rogers were dancing at a time when everyone danced, that their swooning adagios and even their crackling tap duets didn’t look as impossible to audiences who knew how to fox trot and Lindy hop as they do to us now. I remember thinking when I was younger that couples dancing for my parents’ generation was a prelude to sex and, in those movie musicals, a stand-in for it. Now that society had finally cast off its inhibitions, I figured, we could do away with the dancing as a rite of courtship and get straight to the point. Which is of course what happened, both in life and in the movies. It took me another 20 years to realize that the dancing was the point.

Back in the ’70s, the only dancing we knew was solo improvisation in a crowd, with a throbbing disco pulse and strobe lights that froze us as we struck a pose. Even so, we had no difficulty buying into Astaire and Rogers as the ideals we aspired to, the people we intended to be before our two left feet got in the way. Does “La La Land” sell today’s audiences short? Some if not all of us have more imagination than Mr. Chazelle gives us credit for.

Or, assuming he’s right where some sector of the audience is concerned, have viewers’ expectations changed thanks to a steady diet of reality shows? Have we grown so accustomed to the mirror images they provide that we’re no longer capable of identifying with better versions of ourselves?