A new musical film and a satire reveal California’s dark heart
[...] the darker heart of the movie lies in a brief and devastating critique of Southern California, delivered by the jazz pianist played by Ryan Gosling.
There has been no better recent summary of the California struggle — with the very notable exception of the 2015 novel “The Sellout,” whose author, Paul Beatty, recently became the first American to win the prestigious Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
The novel is a taboo-trashing racial satire about an African American urban farmer of watermelons and weed who reintroduces segregation to his South L.A. neighborhood, in hopes of putting it back on the map.
The film and the movie also make the same provocative argument about how to break through the Golden State’s stacked deck:
Gosling’s musician is the film’s romantic hero, because of his uncompromising commitment to restoring traditional jazz even though he can’t pay his bills because the world is abandoning the form.
Stone’s frustrated actress only inches closer to the red carpet when she devotes herself to producing a one-woman play in a theater she can’t afford to rent.
After the city of L.A. removes his minority neighborhood from the map, the farmer fights this fire of systemic discrimination by violating legal and cultural norms.
Two provocative parts of the plot stand out — how long it takes for anyone to notice the farmer’s segregation edicts, and how, through the farmer’s unconstitutional acts, seeds of tolerance and kindness (lower crime, higher test scores, more polite behavior) take root.
No character in the book or the movie is happier than the farmer’s slave in Beatty’s satirized world, an aging actor from “The Little Rascals” who refuses all efforts to free him.