LaLaLand: All That Jazz and Absolutely No Joy

I wanted to love La La Land.

In fact, for approximately five glorious minutes, I did.

The film opens on a Los Angeles motorway, where an ordinary traffic jam explodes into colour, movement and music. Drivers climb out of their cars, dancers leap across bonnets and an entire gridlocked road becomes the stage for “Another Day of Sun.” It is bold, joyful and unapologetically theatrical. Here, at last, was a modern film musical that understood the sheer pleasure of the genre. It was not embarrassed by people bursting into song. It did not apologise for its choreography or try to disguise its sentimentality beneath layers of irony. It promised romance, spectacle and a little bit of magic.

Then the number ended, everyone got back into their cars, and the film became a damp squib.

I kept waiting for La La Land to rediscover the energy of its opening. I waited for the next exhilarating dance sequence, the next unforgettable song and the next moment that would make the world feel brighter than it had before the music started. Instead, I watched two attractive, ambitious people pursue their careers, gradually drift apart and ultimately decide that professional achievement was a perfectly acceptable substitute for the relationship the film had spent two hours asking me to care about.

This may be sophisticated. It may be realistic. It may even be artistically brave.

It did not make me happy.

That matters because La La Land presents itself as a love letter to the great Hollywood musical. Its colours evoke The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Its dancing recalls Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Its story draws upon generations of films in which ordinary life gives way to romance, music and possibility. Yet it borrows the appearance of those musicals without consistently delivering their emotional pleasure.

It dresses itself in primary colours, spins beneath a starry sky and then leaves the audience standing outside in the rain.

Released in 2016, La La Land was greeted as an instant modern classic. It received fourteen Academy Award nominations and won six, including Best Director for Damien Chazelle and Best Actress for Emma Stone. Critics praised its visual style, original music, central performances and willingness to revive a genre that modern Hollywood had largely abandoned.

It was also briefly announced as the winner of Best Picture before the award was revealed to belong to Moonlight, creating one of the most infamous moments in Oscars history.

Strangely, that chaotic ceremony now feels like the most appropriate possible ending to the film’s awards campaign: La La Land gets to experience the joy of winning, but only briefly, before reality intervenes and takes the happy ending away.

The film follows Mia, an aspiring actress working in a coffee shop while enduring a seemingly endless stream of unsuccessful auditions, and Sebastian, a jazz pianist who dreams of opening his own club. They meet through a series of hostile encounters before falling in love, encouraging one another’s ambitions and ultimately being pulled apart by those same ambitions.

There is plenty to admire in that premise. Creative work often demands sacrifice. Relationships are affected by timing, money, opportunity and the slow accumulation of compromises. Two people may genuinely love one another without being able to build a sustainable life together. A romance does not become meaningless simply because it ends.

I understand all of that.

I simply do not watch a brightly coloured musical to be reminded that love may become collateral damage in the pursuit of professional fulfilment.

This is not a demand that every story should end with a wedding and a freeze-frame kiss. Tragedies, bittersweet romances and unresolved relationships can be beautiful. But La La Land spends so much of its runtime using the language of fantasy that its commitment to disappointment feels less profound than faintly mean-spirited. It invites us to believe in cinematic magic and then congratulates itself for being mature enough to take that magic away.

The problem begins with the film’s structure. “Another Day of Sun” establishes a heightened world where an entire motorway can become a stage. It creates enormous expectations—not only for the scale of what follows but for its emotional energy. The number is vibrant, communal and alive. It includes performers of different ages, appearances and backgrounds, all united by the hopeful delusion that success might be waiting for them somewhere beyond the traffic.

Almost everything afterwards feels smaller.

Mia and her housemates perform “Someone in the Crowd,” which initially promises the same exuberance. The costumes are gorgeous, the colours are vivid and the movement has a playful theatricality. But even this sequence soon narrows into Mia feeling isolated at a party. Joy in La La Land rarely lasts without loneliness arriving to tap it on the shoulder.

The most famous dance between Mia and Sebastian, “A Lovely Night,” takes place against a spectacular Los Angeles sunset. They tap dance, tease one another and insist that there could not possibly be any romantic connection between them, despite the fact that the film has placed them alone on a hilltop and lit the sky specifically for their benefit.

It is charming. Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling have an appealing chemistry, and their relative lack of Broadway polish gives the scene an ordinary, intimate quality. They look like two people falling into a dance rather than two professional dancers executing a flawless routine.

But the number is more pleasant than thrilling. That becomes a recurring problem. The film’s musical sequences are tasteful, beautifully photographed and emotionally restrained. They are designed to be admired rather than surrendered to.

Even the planetarium sequence, in which Mia and Sebastian float into the stars, feels oddly bloodless. It is visually beautiful and clearly intended as the moment when their attraction transcends reality. Yet it seems more concerned with recreating the elegance of an old Hollywood dream ballet than with deepening our understanding of the people inside it. They drift through the cosmos because that is what characters in this kind of musical are supposed to do. The imagery tells us their love is magical, but the relationship itself does not always earn the scale of the metaphor.

That relationship is where La La Land most seriously lost me.

Mia and Sebastian connect because they recognise each other’s ambition. He encourages her to write a one-woman play; she encourages him to pursue his dream of opening a jazz club. Their love is bound up with the belief that each of them possesses a talent the rest of the world has failed to appreciate.

This should make their eventual separation devastating.

Instead, their relationship begins to deteriorate just as the film ought to be making us most invested in it. Sebastian joins Keith’s successful band, sacrificing some of his purist ideals in exchange for financial stability. He spends increasing amounts of time touring. Mia stages her play, which is poorly attended, and decides to return home after overhearing negative comments.

Their dinner argument is meant to expose the tension between love and ambition. Mia accuses Sebastian of abandoning his dream; Sebastian suggests that she preferred him when he was unsuccessful because it made her feel better about herself. It is an ugly, credible argument, but it also reveals how little emotional foundation the film has placed beneath their romance. They admire each other’s dreams, certainly. They flirt attractively. They dance well together.

But do they actually know how to support one another when life becomes difficult?

Sebastian misses Mia’s play because of a band photoshoot he had forgotten about. This is the moment when their relationship effectively breaks. Later, he drives to her family home to tell her about an audition, urging her to try once more when she has given up. The gesture leads directly to the opportunity that transforms her career.

Then she succeeds—and they apparently disappear from one another’s lives.

Five years later, Mia is a famous actress. She is married to another man and has a daughter. Sebastian has opened his jazz club, using the name and logo Mia once designed for him. One evening, Mia and her husband enter the club by chance. Sebastian sees her in the audience and plays their musical theme.

The film then launches into its grand final fantasy: an alternative version of their lives in which Sebastian kisses Mia instead of dismissing her after their first meeting. We watch their romance replayed without the arguments, missed performances or separation. Sebastian attends Mia’s play. She succeeds. They marry. They have a child. They enter the jazz club together and sit side by side.

For a few minutes, La La Land gives us the ending we wanted.

Then it takes it back.

The fantasy ends. Mia is still sitting beside her husband. Sebastian is alone at the piano. Mia prepares to leave, they exchange a small smile, and she walks out of his life again.

I know this ending is widely considered the film’s greatest achievement. It is praised for being bittersweet rather than simplistic. Mia and Sebastian have achieved their dreams, and each played an essential role in helping the other reach them. Their love mattered even though it did not last. The final smile communicates gratitude, recognition and acceptance. They are not together, but they have become the people they once hoped to be.

How exquisitely grown-up.

I hated it.

The epilogue does not soften the unhappiness of the ending; it makes it worse. The film painstakingly shows us that Mia and Sebastian could have shared love, family and professional success. It visualises an entire life in which they do not have to choose between personal and creative fulfilment. Then it returns us to reality and expects us to find consolation in their separate achievements.

I did not.

Perhaps I am insufficiently impressed by career success as an emotional conclusion. Mia has become famous. Sebastian owns his club. Their individual ambitions have been realised. But the film has spent its entire story encouraging us to invest in their relationship, only to suggest that becoming professionally successful is enough to compensate for losing it.

It is especially frustrating because their separation never feels inevitable. There is no fundamental incompatibility between them. Neither betrays the other. They do not want radically different kinds of life. Their relationship collapses under pressure, bad timing and poor communication, but the film never convincingly explains why those obstacles could not have been overcome.

Sebastian is apparently willing to drive to another city to find Mia and push her towards the audition that changes her life, but not to maintain contact afterwards. Mia can build an international acting career, marriage and family within five years, but the possibility of reconnecting with the man she loved seems to have vanished without discussion.

The film does not show us a relationship that must end. It simply informs us that it did.

There is also something faintly hollow about its treatment of dreams. Mia’s success comes through a familiar fantasy: one audition, one emotional performance and one person in the room who finally recognises her brilliance. Sebastian’s dream is equally neat. He wants a jazz club; eventually, he has one.

For a film supposedly interested in the painful compromises of creative life, its definition of success is remarkably conventional. Fame proves Mia was talented. Ownership of the club proves Sebastian was right. Their struggles are validated retrospectively because both of them eventually get what they wanted.

Except each other.

That might have worked if the film had truly explored the cost of ambition, but it largely skips over the most interesting years. We do not watch Mia build her career or decide that her relationship with Sebastian cannot survive it. We do not see Sebastian turn his dream into a real business or come to terms with losing her. The film jumps forward and presents the finished products: successful actress, successful club owner, separate lives.

Their development happens somewhere off-screen, where apparently all the most important conversations also took place.

I do not deny the film’s technical achievements. Linus Sandgren’s cinematography is sumptuous. The use of colour gives the film an identity that many modern musicals lack. Justin Hurwitz’s score is elegant, and “City of Stars” has a wistful simplicity that stays in the mind. Emma Stone brings warmth, vulnerability and humour to Mia, particularly during the final audition song, “Audition (The Fools Who Dream).” Ryan Gosling learned enough piano for Sebastian’s musical ability to feel physically convincing.

But I admire these elements separately more than I enjoy the film they create together.

For something celebrated as the triumphant return of the Hollywood musical, La La Land contains surprisingly little of the unrestrained pleasure that makes musicals so powerful. Its songs are often melancholy, its choreography deliberately modest and its romance constructed as something beautiful chiefly because it cannot survive.

That is a valid artistic approach. It just is not the joyous cinematic experience its opening promised me.

“Another Day of Sun” suggested that La La Land would transform frustration into possibility. It took a traffic jam—one of the most tedious experiences imaginable—and turned it into a celebration. That is what musicals can do at their best. They take ordinary life and allow emotion to become so large that speaking is no longer enough. People sing because the feeling must escape somehow. They dance because walking cannot contain it.

For one dazzling number, La La Land understands this perfectly.

Then the music stops, the traffic starts moving, and the film spends the rest of its runtime steadily draining away the joy it created.

I did not need Mia to abandon her career for Sebastian. I did not need Sebastian to abandon his club for Mia. I did not need the film to tell me that romantic love is more important than artistic ambition.

I simply wanted it to believe that happiness did not have to be earned through loss.

Instead, La La Land gives its characters their dreams and treats their broken relationship as the elegant price of admission. It calls this bittersweet. I found it mostly bitter.

The film begins with hundreds of people dancing on their cars beneath the Los Angeles sun. It ends with two people sharing a sad smile across a darkened room, acknowledging a life they could have lived but did not.

Critics saw maturity, beauty and emotional complexity.

I saw a magnificent opening number followed by two hours of diminishing returns.

All that colour. All that music. All that promise.

And, by the end, not a happily-ever-after in sight.