Damien Chazelle’s triumph for his gorgeous musical romance La La Land – winning in every category for which it was nominated, and picking up seven Golden Globes, either makes the film a frontrunner for this awards season, or is the high-water mark of its prize success, given that the Globes are the only awards that specifically carve out a space for musicals and comedies. It’s a huge haul for this richly lovable film about the love affair between a would-be movie star and a tough, sardonic jazz musician: best film and acting awards for Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in the musical/comedy category, together with best director, screenplay, score and song.
That second “musical” genre made this lovely film a shoo-in for success last night, and maybe it’s worth saying now that La La Land is more musical than comedy. You can’t help watching with a beaming smile on your face, never quite extinguished, even through the moments of heartbreak. But it’s the music and the romance which are paramount, rather than the actual laughs. I’ve seen it twice: first at its premiere at last year’s Venice film festival and again this weekend with a paying crowd in a London cinema, and the response has been exactly the same – rapture, almost from the very first moments, with a special audience connection to Emma Stone, whose lovely performance makes her first among equals with her co-star Ryan Gosling. Vulnerable, sweet, smart and funny, it’s as if she mediates between the audience and Ryan’s life and the tough, beautiful, intimidating city of LA itself, which can be so terrifyingly indifferent to the wannabes’ hopes and dreams.
At the risk of being churlish or obtuse about a movie that I love so much, I have to raise a note of disappointment that La La Land’s landslide win shut out a lot of contenders that are now in danger of being forgotten and losing momentum. Chazelle beat Tom Ford (creator of the suspense thriller Nocturnal Animals) to the director’s prize: Ford was my personal favourite here and I regret that his brilliant and spectacular film was largely overlooked – except, a little bafflingly, the best supporting actor prize going to Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Fan of Taylor-Johnson though I am, his contribution was not the very best part of the film, nor the best work that he personally has done. I wonder if Nocturnal Animals is going to be seen as too much of a delicious guilty pleasure to get anything much in the way of silverware in the coming months.
No one could possibly object to the best film (drama) Globe going to Moonlight, directed by that deeply intelligent film-maker Barry Jenkins, whose superbly elegant, eloquent acceptance speeches are incidentally becoming a highlight of this awards season. The poetry and humanity of Moonlight win this film new admirers everywhere it is shown; its ambition and reach combine with subtlety and attention to detail, in creating a personal inner epic: the three stages of a man’s life. As a movie which addresses the lives of LGBT people of colour, it also takes Hollywood away from the white-provincial norm, and raises a bold standard for that much-debased concept: independent cinema.
Kenneth Lonergan’s tremendous film Manchester by the Sea has been decently rewarded with the best actor prize for Casey Affleck, an actor whose career has bloomed over the years. He has has grown in stature and given a performance of depth and richness as the angry, lonely, conflicted janitor who finds himself having to be guardian to his nephew. It’s actually rather moving to remember I first saw Affleck as a kid in the caper Ocean’s Eleven in 2001. Now he’s playing a tough, careworn adult. His character is filled with unresolved and unexpressed pain in this film, and yet you can still see something boyish in his face.
On now, to the most extraordinary award: best actress for Isabelle Huppert, the heroine of Paul Verhoeven’s challenging, bizarre, uproarious and yet often tonally unreadable rape-revenge comedy Elle – which also picked up best foreign language film, trouncing the critics’ favourite, Toni Erdmann. This was in the “drama” category of course, and yet it is perhaps only as a comedy that Elle makes sense. Huppert holds you mesmerised on the screen, and appears also – understandably – to have mesmerised the voters of the Foreign Press Association. This is an extraordinary performance, one which only Huppert could have pulled off. In a way that I can only compare to Christopher Walken, her unique star quality and personality are in a sense unchanging, but her charisma and hauteur are utterly consistent. When Isabelle Huppert comes on the screen, you sit up straight. You know that you are in for something special – and so it proves here, with this magnificent provocation.
Viola Davis is a brilliant character actor, a jewel of her profession, and it is great also to see her pick up best supporting actress in the drama category, starring in the screen version of August Wilson’s play Fences, in which she plays the wife of ex-baseball star Troy, played by the film’s director-star Denzel Washington. Her angry, passionate, desolate monologue, holding her husband to account, is the film’s emotional showstopper and it probably clinched the prize for Davis.
In the animated category, Zootopia was an unexceptional win, a likable movie on the entirely admirable theme of peaceful co-existence – which beat the more modish contender My Life As a Zucchini, which has had a big fanbase since first appearing at Cannes last year.
So La La Land moves into pole position, and will perhaps capture everyone’s heart the way Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist did in 2012: a big, swooning, unashamedly joyful movie that indulges in Hollywood ancestor-worship. My feeling is that when the Oscars happen, more serious pictures such as Manchester by the Sea and Moonlight will overtake La La Land, as more soberly appropriate for our political annus horribilis of Donald Trump. But what a great night for this lovely film.
