La La Land's Life Lessons

Nominated for 14 Oscars, La La Land is, at least in the minds of many critics, one of the best films of the year. It had what the Academy loves most: A focus on Hollywood itself, and incredibly long takes. There has been significant debate about whether it deserved the 14 nominations, but there's another debate right along side it.

Is La La Land a comedy?

In many aspects, it easily fits the mold. We have two sympathetic comic heroes in Mia, portrayed by Emma Stone, and Sebastian, portrayed by Ryan Gosling. The audience is attached to them from the get go and really invested in their characters' development. While Sebastian may seem like a pretentious loser at first, we eventually grow to love him and his passion for Jazz. As for Mia, the viewers can immediately relate to her struggles, even though most of us have never given up our lives to move to Hollywood.

Mia and Sebastian also represent normal people, just two twenty-somethings chasing their dreams in southern California. They aren't movie stars or famous musicians, just regular struggling artists like everyone else. They aren't yet faced with the challenges of upscale Hollywood life, but they endeavor the same Layman's troubles that any one of us do, no matter the situation.

But here's the controversy, and, be warned, spoiler ahead: They don't end up together. We spend the whole movie rooting for these two people and their relationship just to see it end in the final act of the film. And sure, this may not match the typical Hollywood script or the traditional comedic style of a marriage at the end, but it makes the work meaningful, and doesn't detract from it's stance as a comedy.

At its core, a comedy is the rise of a central sympathetic character, or in this case, characters. While they don't end up together in the end, they both achieve what they were striving for the whole time. In fact, their success is what causes them to split, and without their departure from one another, they wouldn't have seen their dreams come to fruition. We do still see the rise of these two characters, despite their loss of each other.

Besides, if they stayed together, it would be just another Hollywood romance story, something the world has too many of already. But now, it's something that's more realistic, something more close to home. It reminds us that we can't have everything in life, and sometimes achieving our dreams comes at a cost. Everyone makes sacrifices in their life, and we see Mia and Sebastian's played out on screen. Sure they don't end up together, but in the end they're not sad. Nostalgic with a touch of melancholy, sure, but not sad. And, as an audience, we learn a lesson. We see that even though we don't have everything, we can still have a happy ending.