Cooper shines in A Star is Born
Bradley Cooper puts his stamp on new version of A Star Is Born
Bradley Cooper always knew he wanted to direct. Ever since he was a kid, the four-time Oscar nominee envisioned a career both in front of and behind the camera.
“I just don’t think I had the confidence to admit it to myself until I was maybe in my 30s,” says Cooper, 43, who made a stop in Toronto recently with actor Sam Elliott.
But the one thing he kept consciously at the back of his mind was: I have time.
“I always thought, ‘Well, Clint Eastwood waited until he was 40 before making Play Misty for Me. So I have until then.’”
Slowly, Cooper was drawn into the idea of remaking A Star Is Born.
The tragic love story was first made into a film in 1937 with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March (though some consider that a remake of George Cukor’s 1932 movie What Price Hollywood?). Two other versions have been made since with Judy Garland and James Mason (1954) and Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson (1976).
For a time, Eastwood was set to direct an update on the story that follows the tumultuous relationship between a rising star and the man who discovers her, but Cooper envisaged his own take.
As Eastwood moved on to other projects, Cooper hatched a story with writers Eric Roth and Will Fetters and assembled a dream cast that includes Elliott, Lady Gaga and Dave Chappelle.
Q Your take on A Star Is Born is the fourth or fifth version of this story. Why do you think this tragic tale endures? Cooper:
I know why it resonated for me. Hopefully if you’re alive you’ve experienced love and the loss of love and all the emotions that go with that. I know what I get out of movies, ultimately, is healing and community, while also hopefully being entertained. So it just felt like the perfect food, or soil, to harvest a story from. You know, the first one didn’t have any music in it. The second one was the beginning of her becoming a singer. That combination of telling a true human love story with a singing voice was something I was interested in. But even more than that, I was excited in this version to create an entire world, which Lady Gaga, Sam and Dave Chappelle and Anthony Ramos helped us tell. It’s really a story about a whole lot of people, which excited me too.
Q Sam, Bradley wrote your part in the film specifically for you. What did you think when he asked you to come on board? Elliott:
I’m always taken back when someone wants me to be part of something. When I went and met with Bradley and saw that he wanted me to play his brother in this piece, I was taken by it. I was taken by his passion for it ... Now that it’s done, I can say I’ve never been involved in a film like this — I truly believe
Now that it’s done, I can say I’ve never been involved in a film like this ... I’ve never been involved in a film where scene after scene after scene takes you places.
that. I feel like I’ve done some nice work in some good films for sure. But I’ve never been involved in a film where scene after scene after scene takes you places.
Q Bradley, we knew Lady Gaga could sing, but you turned out to be a pretty good singer. In the film, you appeared in front of crowds at Coachella, Stagecoach and Glastonbury. Was that nerve-racking ? Cooper:
The whole experience was nerve-racking. Look, if I hadn’t prepared, I would have been petrified to show up on set. That was the thing I took away from this. I watched a documentary on Mike Nichols and they asked him, ‘How do you approach directing ?’ and he replied, ‘Just like acting — I prepare as much as I can and then I show up on set and I just throw it all away.’ I worked like a Trojan learning how to sing in front of people. It’s one thing to sing in the shower, and it’s another thing to go up there in front of people. When you’re in front of a crowd, your nerves start, your endorphins are going, you can lose your breath ... It was just work, and there’s no substitute for work.
Q You wrote several songs that appear in the film. Did you know who you wanted your character Jackson to sound like? Cooper:
I gotta say, and this is to Lady Gaga’s credit, the more we just worked on the songs they just became something. I didn’t base them on anyone. Certainly everyone I’ve listened to and like has influenced me, but there was no template.
Q Lady Gaga is a complete revelation as Ally. How did you know she was the right actress to play the part? Cooper:
Elia Kazan wrote a great autobiography, and he wrote about how he’d never audition actors, he would take them for a walk around the block. That always resonated with me, particularly because I’ve auditioned for 2,500 things over my life. Sometimes in an audition you don’t get a sense of somebody and like Jackson says, ‘Talent is everywhere.’ If you can get someone to relax and be open, they’re going to show you their soul. And someone like her showing her soul is captivating, then you put on top of that Lady Gaga’s incredible acting ... it was astonishing, but not surprising because look what she’s achieved in her other field.
Q The last time A Star Is Born was onscreen was with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson in 1976. How did you want to put your own stamp on this story so it’s something people will watch 40 years from now? Cooper:
All I thought about was trying to make something that was indelibly authentic. That’s all I cared about. That’s where it starts and ends for me. What’s going to become of it is completely out of my control ... The one thing I begged of everyone was to trust me.
Bradley Cooper is out of gin. This is the urgent crisis that sets A Star Is Born in motion: a terrible thirst. In the back of a limousine, facing a 90-minute commute from the rock concert he’s just performed to the next stop on the tour, alt-country star Jackson Maine (Cooper) has finished the last of the mini-bar bottles, and needs one for the road. He asks his driver to pull over beside a neon-lit dive. Over a double on the rocks, he watches Ally, a luminous, theatrical Lady Gaga, prance and croon around the room.
He is awestruck. We are, too. In a vivid shot-reverse shot, the two share a silent exchange in closeup so intensely romantic and extravagant one could almost burst into hysterical tears.
The whole film is like this. It is maudlin, earnest and unfashionably melodramatic. It is too long. It is self-serious. And it is really, truly great.
This is the fourth film to bear this title, but in fact the fifth to tell the story. Not much has changed in more than 80 years: There is the big star imperilled
by booze. There is the gifted ingenue he discovers, becomes enamoured of and, in the end, fatally abandons.
In between, there is the same maelstrom of turbulence and fame and passion — and, in the past three iterations, the same spectacular musical numbers, showily performed and elaborately staged. Why this story? Why are we so fascinated by the criss-crossing double-helix of one woman’s rise and one man’s fall? Perhaps it’s the symmetry of it. The poetic balance of something lost and something gained.
Or perhaps it’s the way the story touches extremes. While Cooper, as both director and star, suffers prodigiously at times in this version, he amplifies and savours the positive side of the emotional pole.
The first act is ecstatic. The couple’s initial meet-cute is extraordinarily lovely; their conversations about life and music have the fizzy thrill of an authentic romance. In every moment they share the easy, blissful chemistry of two people destined to be together on screen.
Cooper sustains this jubilant momentum for 45 minutes. It culminates in a rhapsodic live duet that is among the most exhilarating things I’ve seen in a movie in my life.
The hyperbole-inspiring delirium of this first-act climax has the unavoidable consequence of making everything that follows seem like a slump. I understand the disappointment, but I detect no drop in quality after the 45-minute mark — only a marked waning of exuberance, essential to the overall design. After our elation grandly crests, it suddenly and disturbingly plummets; a euphoric movie becomes a tragic one, as the doomed star begins to move away from happiness toward his ultimate, inescapable fate. The infectious joy of the first half makes the steady decay of the second so painful.
There is a wonderful scene soon after the change in tone: Cooper has persuaded Gaga to join him on the road and perform her original music on stage with him before his nightly audiences of many thousands. She follows him to the farm where he was raised, which Cooper learns has been sold by his elder brother to a condo developer. Furious, he confronts him — and the fight that erupts lays bare a turmoil that has been raging unspoken for years.
Cooper’s brother is played by the great Sam Elliott, who brings to his few extended scenes a fathomless depth of grief and anguish. The performance is a testament to both the actor and Cooper’s direction. He draws from the nuance and intensity of those around him, and is content to recede into the background when it’s time for others to command a scene.
Indeed, for all the film’s immoderation as melodrama, the lead performances are characterized, remarkably, by restraint. As Ally, Gaga feels more natural working in a hotel kitchen than she does lighting up the stage.
A Star Is Born is, like earlier versions, a musical. Gaga is unsurprisingly excellent. Less obvious is how well Cooper acquits himself. It isn’t merely that he sings well — we are to take Jackson Maine as past his prime anyhow — but that Maine and his band are so convincingly a mainstream country-western group.
What Cooper’s film impresses upon us is the precious opportunity stardom affords a select few. It isn’t fame, it isn’t fortune. It’s simply an audience willing to listen to what you have to say. They won’t listen forever, Maine tells Ally, at the height of her success. But they’re listening now.
And in his own way, Cooper is one of the most successful actors in Hollywood doing his best to say something honest and meaningful while we’re still listening.