When I first watched Roman Holiday, I was left hanging on the edge of my seat, waiting for Audrey Hepburn to chase after Gregory Peck and run into his arms as they overcome all the obstacles preventing a princess from marrying a foreign reporter. (Yeah, that was a spoiler. It’s been 67 years, your grace period has ended.) But it never happened. He walked out of the press room alone and she went back to her royal duties. Yet, it’s still number four on AFI’s Top 10 Romantic Comedies List.
Why? Because it was real.
Sure; while the first word that comes to mind regarding a story about a princess running away in the middle of the night and getting taken in by one of the reporters desperate for a story about her might not be "realistic", the logistics of the story are sound enough. When you stop trying to argue against the plausibility of the plot, the movie becomes something magical and dreamy that you root for because something inside you wants it to be true for you. Fair: not everyone’s subconscious pines to be Audrey Hepburn getting swept away by Gregory Peck and having misadventures throughout Rome. (Mine does, though that's neither here nor there.) But a part of everyone, somewhere in them, wants to believe in a love this passionate and fanciful for themselves.
In the same way Roman Holiday was, La La Land is a fantastic whirlwind of a movie; dazzling and inviting, it forces you to stop questioning every character breaking out into song- as it becomes clear in the first scene with the herd of Los Angeles commuters getting out of their cars to dance on the highway that this is not your basic rom-com- and come along for the ride. But unlike other romantic comedies where the objective is to achieve love at whatever obscene cost, La La Land reminds us that sometimes love doesn’t have to mean “happily ever after.”
For those who have seen it -as well as those who blatantly ignored the spoiler alert - we painfully remember that despite pushing each other to chase their dreams and saying they would love each other forever, Mia and Sebastian don’t end up together; they do, however, both end up where they always wanted to be. My mother walked out of the theater and told those waiting for the next showing not to see the movie because it would make them cry, too. In a way, her reaction proved what I said about Roman Holiday: the endings of these two movies are incredibly realistic in comparison to literally any other romantic comedy and because of that, they hurt us. They display the part of love that we don’t want movies to show because it drops us down from the Cloud Nine all the magical sights and musical numbers had brought us to.
As sad as it was to watch Sebastian play for the life they could have had and Mia leave crying but with another man, La La Land's ending was necessary for a key reason: it reminds viewers that while a dreamy love like theirs is attainable off screen, it is not always the thing we need to achieve a happy ending. It reminds us that the objective of life is not necessarily love at any obscene, romantic-comedy cost, but working for and towards what makes us happy.
