The Beauty of La La Land’s Not-So-Happy Ending

This past week, I watched the 2016 film La La Land for the first time (I know, I’m kind of late to it!). I loved the movie and I loved the music, but the ending is what I found so compelling and I haven’t stopped thinking about it.

La La Land follows a struggling actress, Mia (Emma Stone), and a struggling jazz musician, Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), as they both chase their dreams and fall in love.

The film is a love story and the story of dreaming artists. It’s a fun, inspiring, and primarily happy musical-film. And all of that is why the ending is so unique, touching, and sad.

Mia and Sebastian do each end up getting their “happily ever afters”, with Mia becoming a famous actress and Sebastian opening up the jazz club he had dreamed of for years. But surprisingly, Mia and Sebastian don’t end up together.

La La Land ends with a montage of what their lives could have been like together but then flashes back to reality where Mia and her husband attend Sebastian’s club. As Mia leaves the club, she and Sebastian share a heartbreaking smile, and then she just leaves. And then the film ends. It’s a very non-traditional ending for a romantic film.

There is a lot to think about with this ending, and I’m going to share some of the lessons that come from it.

Singleness and Chasing Dreams

Mia and Sebastian are both artists and at their cores, they are dreamers. To achieve your dreams in any area, especially in acting or music, you have to give 100% of yourself and make a lot of sacrifices. 

Mia and Sebastian realized that if they each want to achieve their dreams, they would have to let each other go because they knew they would hold each other back. Here are the lines of their breakup scene when Sebastian tells Mia that if she gets her acting role, she has to give it her all:

Sebastian: “When you get this - you’ve got to give it everything you’ve got. It’s your dream. 

Mia: What are you going to do?

Sebastian: I’ve got to follow my own plan. Stay here. Get my own thing going. You know…You’re going to be in Paris. Good jazz there. And you love jazz now. Right?

Mia: Right.

Sebastian: I guess we’re just going to have to wait and see.

Mia: You know I’m always going to love you.

Sebastian: I’m always going to love you too.

This beautiful and heartbreaking scene explores a very real situation where two people love each other but have conflicting dreams and futures. Oftentimes, people choose to sacrifice their dreams in order to be with the person they love, and this can be a great thing. That’s not the choice Mia and Sebastian made, though.

Love doesn’t always mean sacrifice - sometimes it means letting somebody go so that they can achieve their dreams. Sebastian felt that he would stop Mia from giving her job her all, and he didn’t want to do that to her.

I think there is also a lesson to be learned here about the beauty of being single and being free to chase your dreams without having to sacrifice for somebody else. I’m a teenager, and it can often feel like being single is something to escape from and that marriage is the ultimate goal in life. 

The truth is, time as a single person is the best time to really go for your dreams and find yourself. Sometimes, like Mia and Sebastian, it’s even the right choice to sacrifice a relationship in order for each person to achieve their dreams if that’s what matters most to them.

La La Land explores the idea that for a true dreamer, time spent single is a good thing and is sometimes necessary in order to achieve a dream. There is a time for everything in life, and singleness doesn’t last forever for most people. So, view singleness as an opportunity to completely go for your dreams and be a little selfish about what you want for yourself and your life.

The Forever Impact of Relationships

I believe that one of the main points of La La Land is to show how love can have lifelong impacts on a person and their dreams, even if that one relationship isn’t lifelong.

If Mia and Sebastian had never met and never fallen in love, there’s a real chance they never would have achieved their dreams in the way they did. So, even though Mia and Sebastian didn’t have the happily ever after they may have wished for, they still deeply impacted each other’s lives.

Every relationship that we experience as humans, whether it is romantic or not, has some sort of impact on us and on our circumstances. It’s important to walk through life knowing that everything is meant to be in its own time. Sometimes things will last forever, and sometimes they won’t. 

There is beauty in both situations, and La La Land shows the beauty in a love that isn’t forever. Mia and Sebastian show us that just because two people don’t have a “happy ending”, it doesn’t mean that their relationship wasn’t beautiful, impactful, and meant to be at the time it was.

So, though the ending to La La Land is sad and I was sort of hoping that Mia and Sebastian would still end up together, there is so much depth to the actual ending. La La Land seems like it should have a happy, feel-good ending like many other similar films. Instead, La La Land’s ending was deeply touching and showed the beauty of an untraditional and not-so-happy ending. I hope that I was able to show you a few reasons why I loved this ending so much and some of the lessons it teaches!

Bonus - A Few of My Favorite La La Land Quotes:

“People love what other people are passionate about.”

• Mia

“I’m letting life hit me until it gets tired. Then I’ll hit back. It’s a classic rope-a-dope.”

• Sebastian

“A little chance encounter could be the one you’ve waited for.”

• Mia

“I just feel that people, when they say that they, you know, hate jazz... they just... they don't have context, they don't know where it comes from. You know? Jazz was born in a little flophouse in New Orleans, and it just, because people were crammed in there, they spoke five different languages, they couldn't talk to each other. The only way they could communicate was with jazz.”

• Sebastian

Mia: Honestly, I wish I loved something else. I’ve tried so hard to want other things…Should’ve been a lawyer.

Sebastian: ‘Cause the world needs more lawyers.

Mia: Well it doesn’t need more actresses.

Written by Peyton Price - Entertainment Values