Seeking inspiration in the Big Smoke

#TIFF 16: Critic’s Dispatches

Damien Chazelle’s La La Land offers a deep breath filled with human notes in an urban landscape where the creative urge is often filtered and conditioned for comfort

By Katherine Monk

TORONTO — The condo tower I’m staying at affords me a view of downtown Toronto’s rooftops: squares and rectangles carving their way into the horizontal blue line of Lake Ontario. Sheer glass and steel boxes topped with trailing steel tubes that allow sealed office buildings to breathe.

Inspiration, mechanized.

It’s a necessity in an urban landscape that denies human scale, and emotionally speaking, all things human. But I didn’t even notice the ambient drone of a thousand HVAC fans whirring away over the Big Smoke until today — until I saw Damien Chazelle’s La La Land and rediscovered what true inspiration really feels like: A deep breath exhaled as song.

The view from Front Street, looking Southeast to Lake Ontario

Sure, La La Land had already been touted as the big buzz movie at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. A musical set in modern Los Angeles starring Ryan Gosling as a jazz pianist and Emma Stone as an aspiring actress, the movie was destined to attract attention from the media pool. We’re constantly searching for the next shiny thing, a sexy tidbit attached to a big-name star, something to justify our scribbling to the outside world — and hopefully, rack up some site traffic, a million random clicks to make it feel meaningful.

But so much of what we end up seeing is inspiration of the mechanical variety: the human experience processed and filtered, conditioned for comfort, pollution-free. I’ve seen so many movies here that shy away from deep inspiration in favour of safe, shallow formula. Yet, Chazelle took a deep breath of Los Angeles smog and hacked out something human. And beautiful.

His story of two people trying to find love and creative success in the big city plays to every Hollywood cliche, but in its colourful sets and chromatic themes, La La Land touches on truth.

It’s ironic that something as artificial as a musical featuring tap dancing sequences and production numbers in Griffith Park could offer a more authentic experience than some of the higher-minded documentaries, but therein lies the true magic of moviemaking.

By placing us in an abstract environment off the top — with full-on dance number on the LA freeway — Chazelle tosses the expectation of ‘autheniticy’ out the window like a spent cigarette.

We’re free to follow Sebastian (Gosling) and Mia (Stone) on their surreal adventure unhindered by thought of “well, that couldn’t really happen in real life.”

When the two of them float upward into the stars in the midst of a soft-shoe, we’re not thinking “how did the staff at the planetarium allow them to touch the equipment after hours?”

I had no idea so much of my own critical response rested on believable possibility. All movies are fictions, of one variety or another. Only genuine emotion that makes them ‘real,’ and that’s why La La Land succeeds as well as it does.

Chazelle, Gosling and Stone find the right notes as they tap dance through both the musical and dramatic passages that take us through the ups and downs of L.A.’s rolling landscape that pits big dreams against the Goliath of business.

Our two heroes are trying to succeed without selling out. And every bone in our bodies is eager for them to succeed: Gosling is the jazz purist who believes every familiar melody can be made new again in the moment of performance. And Stone is the actor who offers up a beautifully teary moment in an audition, only to have it quashed by a production assistant delivering a post-it note.

La La Land both destroys and affirms Hollywood mythology in the very same breath. It pulls us into the dream factory with backlot shots and pool parties, then literally tap-dances around its constant state of soul-crushing compromise.

The beauty of it is we don’t think about what he’s doing, the mechanics of its fabrication or its abstraction of real life. It puts us in an altered state for the duration, where we’re not only freed from boxes and filtered air of urban terrestrial existence, we’re able to hear the faint strains of song that somewhat miraculously, still reside in the collective human heart.

Timothy Spall stars as Holocaust denier David Irving in Mick Jones’s Denial

Chazelle’s tuneful salute to the creative spirit was enough to make the other movies of the day feel a little flat by comparison. So when it comes time to write the big review for a movie like Denial, a courtroom drama about Holocaust denier David Irving and his libel suit against author and historian Deborah E. Lipstadt, I’ll have to recalibrate.

The film is an entirely competent retelling of the real-life events, and actually begins with a recreated clip of Irving speaking at the University of Alberta, around the same time Ernst Zündel was propagating hate with similar attacks on historical fact. Buy fluoxetine online

Rachel Weisz plays Lipstadt, a professor who pointed out the fallacies in Irving’s books, essentially calling him a liar. A newly svelte Timothy Spall plays Irving, a man so desperate for academic approval he feels he has no other option but to sue. Buy lipitor online

David Hare’s script navigates the minefield of the material with grace and gravitas. Spall, Weisz and the ensemble are everything you’d hope for from a top-notch English cast that also features another incredible turn from Tom Wilkinson, but Mick Jackson’s direction follows a journeyman path. Buy zoloft online

He finds an easy villain in the racist, sexist and arrogant Irving, ensuring the audience can sit comfortably in judgment, breathing in some well-conditioned air — without any sense of deep inspiration.

And so the festival goes. I’ll keep watching, and I’ll keep hoping for the magic, but as the festival landscape fills up with high-profile boxes posing as art, I’m not holding my breath.

The Toronto International Film Festival runs September 8-18, check in with The Ex-Press for daily updates.

@katherinemonk