Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling have shared the screen together in three films, but how do they rank from worst to best? Each screen darlings in their own way, the actors first collaborated in the 2011 rom-com Crazy, Stupid, Love. The effect was palpable, culminating (at least so far) with the 2016 Oscar juggernaut La La Land. Their chemistry has been noted by many of their collaborators, with Stone telling E! News that she couldn't "even imagine what my life would be without Ryan."
Gosling leapt onto the scene in a smaller role in 2000's Remember the Titans, but stormed his way into the public's hearts in the 2004 romance The Notebook. Starring alongside Eurovision lead Rachel McAdams, his dreamy turn cemented him as one of America's sexiest movie stars. His career continued with a whole slew of interesting choices, garnering an Oscar nomination in 2007 for Half Nelson. Interestingly enough, that was the same year Emma Stone debuted in the iconic comedy Superbad, cementing herself as one of the most magnetic "girls next door" in modern cinema. Her continued presence in studio comedies led her inextricably to Gosling in Crazy, Stupid, Love, where their sizzling chemistry led directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa to note, in ET, that they "get on like a house on fire."
Gosling and Stone's onscreen rapport has invited comparisons to legendary screen duos like Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, or Grant and Rosalind Russell. The timeless, movie-star quality of both performers has made them ineffably watchable on their own but dynamite when combined. Here are their film collaborations, ranked from worst to best.
This cartoony noir from Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer had its release date pushed back after concerns that some of its more violent passages would be too disturbing in the wake of the Aurora shootings of 2012. When faced with the goofy, plastic-feeling aesthetic of this film's action sequences, the concern seems unnecessary. Indeed, Gangster Squad begins strong enough, with Thanos and Cable actor Josh Brolin heading a crew of LAPD detectives cracking down on Sean Penn's Mickey Cohen. Penn spends most of the movie trying to push through his excessive makeup with a genuinely intriguing, hard-boiled performance. Meanwhile, Fleischer himself can't seem to make up his mind whether he wants to craft an old-fashioned gangster flick or spend two hours spoofing the genre. Around the middle of the movie, he all but throws his hands up in defeat, devolving the proceedings into an uber-violent sub-par action movie.
The highlights, other than Penn's scene-stealing performance, are undoubtedly Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, whose meeting at a nightclub calls to mind legendary screen duos like Hepburn and Tracy. Stone, iconic in a red dress, plays Penn's doomed but steely "etiquette teacher" Grace Faraday, and Gosling is the smooth-talking cop Jerry Wooters. Without a doubt, they're the actors with the most ease in this bloated genre exercise, and their chemistry sizzles right off the screen. Watching them, the viewer gets the sense that these two would be movie stars in any decade of Hollywood history. Alas, they're ultimately at the mercy of a flat script and tonally confused direction that renders their efforts all but moot.
Gosling and Stone's first collaboration was in the cloyingly cutesy romantic comedy from 2011, Crazy, Stupid, Love. Featuring a sprawling ensemble cast, the script by Dan Fogelman mashes up the "middle-aged man trying to hook up with as many women as he can" vibes of The 40-Year-Old-Virgin (Steve Carell stars) with the "pickup artist mentors man on his game" plot of Hitch. The results are mixed, if inoffensive. It's not as cavity-inducing as Love, Actually, although a final act, which attempts to tie together the film's disparate plot strands, is largely disappointing. Similarly, a subplot about a young boy in love with his babysitter is an exercise in creepiness, leading up to a finale that seems to endorse the boy's stalker-hood as an admirable pursuit of love.
All this to say that if the film had instead just focused on Gosling's pick-up artist character and Stone's law-school grad, things would've wound up far better. Gosling, so good in films as varied as Blade Runner 2049 and The Big Short, gives one of his best charm offensives here, and Stone's winning combination of plucky nerdiness that gives way to accessible lovestruck wildness is near a career-best. A scene where she cheekily commands Gosling to remove his shirt, only to explode in ecstatic glee at the sight of his abs, is as funny and sexy a moment as has ever graced the rom-com genre. Of course, their reenactment of the Dirty Dancing lift is the film's iconic setpiece, and arguably worth the price of admission alone.
It can be hard to separate La La Land from the Best Picture flub of 2016, but removed from the hype, it's actually a fairly modest little movie. The entire gimmick of this Hollywood throwback musical is that it is a Hollywood throwback musical. It’s in CinemaScope, everything looks Technicolor, and most of the numbers are filmed head-to-toe in one shot. It’s technically proficient work by the clearly talented Damien Chazelle, but despite a majestic score by Justin Hurwitz, which combines classic jazz with the sweep of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the film rarely manages to match the swoony transcendence of its progenitors like Top Hat or Singin' in the Rain. A lot of that has to do with the fact that, framed as they are a la Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers, Ryan Gosling's too-cool-for-school hoofing and Emma Stone's whispery vocals never manage to justify their casting in a musical.
Where they excel, however, is as the leads of an Old Hollywood screwball comedy romance, which is funnily enough where this film (and these performances) hit its stride. As one can tell from the casting of Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie in Chazelle's upcoming Babylon, the writer-director loves his movie stars. It's been stated above that Stone and Gosling are the Hepburn and Tracy of the modern era, and part of the genius of this film is its capitalization on that fact. Their dance steps may falter, their singing may leave something to be desired, but their chemistry is undeniable. Fittingly enough, this is the only of the duo's collaborations to net them both Oscar nominations, with Stone winning for her role as Mia. It's hard to deny. Hurwitz's masterful score aside, their performances are the closest the film gets to reaching its throwback aspirations.
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