A STAR IS REBORN
Newest version of movie is maudlin and melodramatic, but oh so compelling
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.