La La Land
“Damien Chazelle overreaches in La La Land by centering a white man who insinuates that young Black musicians don’t understand the genre their forefathers created.”
Title: La La Land (2016)
Director: Damien Chazelle 👨🏼🇺🇸
Writer: Damien Chazelle 👨🏼🇺🇸
Reviewed by Angie 👩🏻🇺🇸🌈
Technical: 4/5
La La Land is enjoyable and well-executed, but not ground-breaking enough to deserve the hype and adulation heaped upon it by Hollywood. In fact, parts of the movie were straight-up boring.
Gender: 3.5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES
The cast is limited so Mia (Emma Stone) gets a fair share of screen time. Docking points, however, for lack of complexity in the female characters and outdated gender roles. Nearly all women depicted want to be actresses and are clad in purposefully nostalgic, 1950s hourglass dresses, while the men wear 3-piece suits and fedoras. Towards the end, nuclear family lives are depicted as the end goal—marriage, children, date nights, end scene.
Race: 1.5/5
There’s a reason why this film is getting singled out for its lack of diversity. While it does tick some boxes in Black representation, ultimately its mishandling of Black culture and erasure of Latinos (who make up nearly half of Angelenos) is too problematic to ignore.
We won’t go in-depth, as Amanda Joy has already tackled it brilliantly in her piece “The Uncomfortable Subject of Race in La La Land,” but in short: Chazelle explores the argument that modern-day musicians have forsaken jazz, and only a fanatic can keep its purity alive. On its own, that hardly offends. However, the optics are damning as the white male lead preaches to Black artists about how to interpret a musical genre whose very roots stem from the Black experience.
The audacity of this dynamic, plus the complete erasure of Latinos from a film set in Los Angeles, makes La La Land eye-wincingly bad on racial representation.
Mediaversity Grade: C 3.00/5
Conformist on Gender and cringe-worthy on Race, this film is nothing to write home about but for its overblown adulation within Hollywood circles. While Chazelle hit a home run with his previous jazz-centric film, Whiplash, he overreaches here in centering a white man who insinuates that young Black musicians don’t understand the genre their forefathers created.
This poor handling is a glaring distraction throughout the film. Somewhere up the chain of command, folks seriously dropped the ball on what would otherwise have been a much stronger film—or at least, a less controversial one—had they paused to think about having Ryan Gosling whitesplain jazz to John Legend. In the end, beyond its music and costume, La La Land is retro in more ways than one.