The Cars of La La Land - Sebastian's 1982 Buick Riviera

I was driving this 1982 Buick Riviera when I met my wife, Janet. To this day she chides me about it calling it an “old man's car.” Much to my delight, the other night we watched La La Land on Netflix, and Ryan Gosling's character, Sebastian, drives a 1982 Buick Riviera.

Granted, Sebastian's Riviera was a convertible while mine was a hardtop, but seeing one of the leads in a big Hollywood movie driving the same year, make and model of car I once did was, through my foggy goggles, vindicating. And it was delicious.

I bought my Riviera in January 1988 after I wrecked my 1975 Chrysler Cordoba on an icy morning just after Christmas. Granted, I really wanted a Camaro, Trans Am or Mustang, but with my driving record chock-full of speeding tickets and accidents, I couldn't touch the insurance payments on anything remotely construed as a performance car. In hindsight, I should have bought some inherently practical four-cylinder whatever, but young Turk that I was, not unlike Sebastian in La La Land, I couldn't drive no stinkin' economy car. I had my standards.

As misguided and convoluted as they may have been.

My Riviera and Sebastian's were part of the sixth generation of Rivieras, which was all-new for 1979. The new Riviera was front-wheel drive and shared its platform and much of its mechanical architecture with the also-new-for-1979 Oldsmobile Toronado and Cadillac Eldorado. Motor Trend thought so highly of the turbocharged, sport-tuned Riviera S-Type that it awarded the car its highly sought-after 1979 Car of the Year honors. The Riviera S-Type came standard with Buick's turbocharged 3.8-liter V6, although a Buick-built "350" V8 could be substituted.

Encompassing some of the spirit of the magnificent, if not seminal, 1963 Riviera, the 1979 Buick Riviera seemed to foretell a future full of blue skies and sunshine for General Motors through the 1980s and beyond.

Spoiler alert: Like Sebastian and his love interest Mia's (Emma Stone) future, which once shined so brilliantly, GM eventually crashed and burned.

Janet and I fared much better.

In a major motion picture, “car casting” doesn't happen by accident and can be a most important set-design element. In La La Land, the production designers agonized over what car to give Sebastian. They ultimately settled on a red 1982 Buick Riviera convertible, a car that production designer David Wasco said Ryan Gosling himself helped choose. It was an outdated car that fit Sebastian's throwback personality perfectly.

What's more, the differences between a big, gas-swilling old Buick and the Toyota Prius Mia drives underscore the vast differences between the two of them. As opposites sometimes do, these two self-absorbed dreamers worked as a couple.

That is, until their dreams got in the way of “them.”

There are some parallels between Sebastian, Mia and my wife and me, too. My wife is more than happy to say she's “just like Mia,” and I wholeheartedly concur. Whereas I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit I have more than my fair share of Sebastian in my DNA. Well, what can I say? We both drove 1982 Buick Rivieras.

I think fondly of my Riviera now, although, frankly, I know I love the idea of it relative to my life at the time more than I love the car itself. My Riviera was slow, handled like a bathtub full of water, was sloppily assembled and broke down so often I was on a first-name basis with the counter people at Hertz and Avis.

Still, much like at the end of La La Land, when Sebastian and Mia ponder what their lives might have been like together “for the long haul,” the fact that it was the car I had when I first met my wife makes getting another one a wonderful thing to think about.

And if I were to get another one, it'd be a red convertible, just like Sebastian's.

I think fondly of my Riviera now although, frankly, I know I love the idea of it relative to my life at the time more than the car itself. My Riviera was slow, handled like a bathtub full of water, was sloppily assembled and broke down so often I was on a first name basis with the counter people at Hertz and Avis. Still, much like at the end of "La La Land" when Sebastian and Mia ponder what their lives would have been like together "for the long haul", it being the car I had when I first met my wife, my getting another one is wonderful to think about. And if I was to get another one, it'd be a red convertible just like Sebastian's.