If you’ve seen my rundown of the year’s best films, you’ll know I really, really liked La La Land.
Like most musicals, it features a pair of dreamers. Mia (Emma Stone) is a barista working at a movie lot coffee shop, but she longs to be an actress. Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) is a “serious musician” who floats through an endless stream of low-level musical gigs. But he loves jazz music—the pure, unpredictable jazz played by Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk. He wants to open his very own club.
The two, naturally, find each other and fall in love. But in La La Land, happiness comes with a complexity that perhaps Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers never hinted at.
La La Land is a nostalgic, musical love letter to the “City of Stars.” It dares evoke some great musicals from the past—especially Singin’ in the Rain, the greatest of all. And even if, in some ways, La La Land suffers in comparison (Ryan Gosling just isn’t the hoofer that Gene Kelly was), it still embraces the narrative thread that runs through most Golden Age musicals: The beauty of the outsized dream.
Dreamers fill our musicals. Singin’ in the Rain’s Kathy Selden, dreaming like Mia of life on screen. My Fair Lady’s Eliza Doolittle imagining how “loverly” it would be to get off the streets and care for someone, and to have someone care for her. Maria and Tony from West Side Story, diving into their quixotic love story in spite of the obstacles. There’s Quixote himself, the Man of La Mancha who sings of dreaming the impossible dream. There’s King Arthur and his Camelot. Even Kermit the Frog plunks on his banjo and talks about “the lovers, the dreamers and me” in The Muppet Movie. Songs are filled with such aching longing. Dance numbers gush with toe-tapping optimism—hinting in the belief that maybe dreams do come true.
They don’t always. Not even in musicals. But the dreams themselves, our musicals tell us, have value. They’re not just beautiful: They’re critical.
As I drove home from La La Land, it occurred to me: Christianity has the curious vibe of an old-school musical. Christianity is a faith of dreamers.
It’s easy to lose sight of that today. Christianity has been with the world for a long time, and for a good chunk of its history, it’s been a social, political and even military force. Even now, in an increasingly secular age, the Christian religion wields some serious temporal power and influence. Some reject it in part because it feels like The Man.
But strip the faith down to its essence, and we find it’s built on a beautiful, daring dream: That we’re loved by the greatest Being in the universe, that we’re more precious to Him than a galaxy of gold. And someday, like Kathy Seldon, like Eliza Doolittle, we’ll find ourselves living in a paradise with Him. Wouldn’t that be loverly?
David, Israel’s dreamstruck, improbable king, was a musician himself—singing God’s praises and dancing with delight. The Bible overflows with song. And while admittedly there aren’t a lot of show-stopping dance numbers to be found in Scripture, our faith is willed with dreamers: Moses led his people out of the most powerful nation on earth to find a land of milk and honey based on what he heard from a burning bush. Paul traveled the known world, singing the praises of the beautiful dream he holds as true. A band of ragged fishermen and tax collectors left home to follow a simple rabbi from Galilee as He preached, healed and eventually died—following Him even after.
We Christians feel we have plenty of logical, practical, grounded reasons for following Jesus ourselves, of course. Our dream is not built on sand.
But evidence is not proof. Those who follow this strange path are dreamers. We sing songs of longing and hope, of doubt and love. We dance to the syncopated beat of the spirit
Mia sings:
Here’s to the ones who dream,
Foolish as they may seem
Here’s to the hearts that ache
Here’s to the mess we make.
We ache. We make messes. We may seem foolish to many. And yet we dream our dreams, and we ask folks to dream along with us. There are many who would say we live in a La La Land of our own. But we can’t, and wouldn’t, have it any other way.
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