The great onscreen duo of Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling light up La La Land, an amazing joyride and my favorite movie of the year. These two are the improbable successors to Tracy and Hepburn. I mean, just look:
Of all the awards I'd most like to see La La Land receive at the Oscars, the one I hope for the most is an acting award for Emma Stone. The final scene of the movie shows why.
The movie is rich with the ingredients that make great cinema. Look at the lighting, the color, the composition of this shot:
Or the freshness and energy of this one:
Throughout the movie, Stone and Gosling dance, sing, emote, and dazzle. They play scenes that are playful, poignant, creative, sad, energetic—everything. But nowhere is Stone's talent more evident than in the last scene, in which her character, Mia, performs at an audition for what could be a breakthrough part. We've seen Mia pursue her acting career with varying levels of humiliation and dashed hopes, and this feels like her last chance. She comes into the audition room, and there is no direction and no script. The producers ask her to just . . . perform.
The whole lengthy scene is as plain as can be. Stone is wearing a simple, pale gray sweater. There is no set design, no clever cinematography. It is just Stone standing in front of a blank wall. And she begins to talk: "My aunt used to live in Paris . . ." Her plain talk soon evolves into a light, sweet song, and we're off. For minutes on end, we do nothing but look at her face and hear her voice, and it's magic.
Emma Stone is unprepossessing in appearance here, but that's the point: the ineffability of talent. The whole movie is a demonstration of the joys of art: the dancing, the music, the emotion, the visuals. But the director seems to be saying, in this last scene, that art isn't a matter of tricks and spectacle. You can take away all of the yummy treats that the movie has offered and be left with one single, simple offering, and it's still a feast.
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