It seems Damien Chazelle’s semi-musical has had enough unadulterated praise, enough Golden Globes and enough Oscar nominations (14!), to justify people dissing it.
There has even been quite a fun SNL sketch in which Aziz Ansari gets arrested and interrogated for not loving it:
Bring on the backlash. And La La Land has felt it on every front, from the fact that Ryan Gosling’s character barges into Emma Stone’s character, to there being too many Toyotas in the movie.
But the biggest criticism has been that there were insufficient big parts for actors of color, considering it’s a film occupied with the legacy of jazz.
Lots of black actors play jazz musicians, but few of them having speaking parts, and they spend most of their time as the white lead’s backing band.
Gosling’s character Seb, who is obsessed with jazz, has been labeled a “white savior” of jazz by film critics, musicians and lay punters alike.
#LaLaLand was really good but pls don't let the visual/sonic praise drown out concerns about its gross white saviour narrative!!
— yasir (@_yasirpiracha) January 16, 2017
black people invented jazz but now we need a white man to come save/preserve it? sorry this narrative doesn't work for me in 2016
— Rostam Batmanglij (@matsoR) December 21, 2016
There’s one big problem with this. Seb isn’t a set up to be the savior of jazz. Or anything.
He’s a sad white guy who likes jazz to the exclusion of anything else. And he doesn’t even like all of jazz: only Bebop up to the point where Miles Davis tripped out on Bitches Brew. This effectively rules out all of jazz for the last half-century.
And don’t get him started on “modern” jazz, which his old mucka Keith (John Legend) wants him to play for a grand a week. Talk about tribulations.
Seb’s big dream is to take an LA bar that used to be a famous jazz club and restore it to its heyday. That is, to create a museum to a time which he could never know because he wasn’t there. Seb is a nostalgist, just as the film is about all forms of nostalgia.
As Keith rightly tells him, all the great jazzers Seb loves were revolutionaries. “But how can you expect to be revolutionary if you’re so traditional?”
He’s just another white jazz bore in patent leather shoes. If Seb wasn’t played by Ryan Gosling, therefore handsome and effortlessly charming, he’d be completely tragic. Besides playing the piano well, he has no enviable qualities. Even outside of playing jazz, Seb is an arse.
La La Land could only take place in LA because if a guy snubbed an NYC girl in a bar she'd never give him the chance to mansplain jazz later
— Jenn Ficarra (@JenniferFicarra) January 9, 2017
To criticise the film itself because the characters are jerks, as if they are real people we actually spend time with, is silly. But the fact remains: Seb is an annoying bloke for a lot of the time. That is who the character is, and that is why the film works.
If he was nicer, more supportive, less difficult, the bittersweet ending wouldn’t be as effective.
Another thing. Would the savior of jazz, white or black, play a theme that any jazzer worth his or her salt couldn’t appreciate? The actual music was the film’s let-down.
And it is jarring to see a snobbish main character wince at electronics being incorporated into the genre, then invent some whack, circle of fifths-based theme to symbolise himself and his lover.
In the New Yorker, Richard Brody called the theme “much closer to Eddy Duchin or Liberace than to Cecil Taylor or, for that matter, Art Tatum”.
If there has to be a pragmatic savior of jazz in the film, it is Keith. He’s trying to get people who don’t know about jazz, or ordinarily like jazz, listening to it, or at least a derivative of it.
And he’s found a better way than just droning on about how great jazz is, the way Gosling does – even if this does involve going electric and using Ableton pads.
In the end Seb achieves his dream: to own a two hundred-capacity night spot where people can go to look cool in spats.
La La Land isn’t about a white man saving jazz. It’s about two people, one of whom is stuck in the past, longing for an “Old Jazz” that almost certainly didn’t exist the way he pictures it.
Just as the film is a throwback to old musicals and an “Old Hollywood” that was all make-believe in the first place.
