The latest iteration of A Star Is Born, the third remake in the 81 years since the original premiered, manages to craft a clever, well-executed film beneath its enormous budget and the star power of the two leads. It dispenses with much of the schlock and sentiment of most mass-market dramas – and of the original film – but keeps the essential framework of the story, layering it with humor and well thought-out dialogue. For about two hours, it might be the best movie of the year, although the failure to set up the film’s climactic moment detracts from much of what came before.
Bradley Cooper co-wrote the new script and directed the film while also starring as a roots-rock artist Jackson Mayne, who is selling out stadiums and can’t go in public without people trying to surreptitiously take his picture. He’s also an alcoholic and drug addict, which we see in the opening scenes of the film, and which leads him to stop in a bar somewhere outside New York City – a drag bar where their former waitress Ally, played by Lady Gaga, sings every Friday night. She performs “La Vie en Rose,” and Mayne is utterly smitten by her voice, her personality, and her looks. She confesses to him that she wants to be a singer but she’s been told by every record executive that she’s not attractive enough to be a commercially successful artist. Of course, if you know the story at all, you know that he disagrees, takes her under his wing, and turns her into a star, all while the two have a fairy-tale sort of romance that can’t possibly last given his self-destructive tendencies.
The story has been told before, although the original script, co-written by Dorothy Parker, revolved around a young actress discovered while working as a waitress at a Hollywood studio party by a famous actor already on the decline due to his drinking. The new version of A Star Is Born works hard to provide complexity to both of its main characters, including an extensive back story to Mayne to try to explain why he continues to abuse a panoply of substances; the story’s focus on those two characters to the almost total exclusion of anyone else makes it an unusually dense, smart script for a major studio release, and gives the two leads tremendous material for performances that both seem like locks for Oscar nominations.
Cooper has more to work with here, as he’s the primary character, has that more detailed character history, and has written in much more complexity to Jackson than he gave Ally. But Lady Gaga’s performance was even more revelatory, both because she has virtually no acting experience in film and very little in TV, and because she conveys so much of her character’s emotional vulnerability beyond reciting dialogue. If they gave out awards for the best use of an actor’s hands to show you a character’s emotional state, she’d be the overwhelming favorite. The two together have undeniable, immediate chemistry, and the story just of the first night they met is a perfect meet-cute anecdote that, of course, can’t last in the long term. (My only quibble with Lady Gaga is that she’s too pretty for the whole “you’re not pretty enough to be a rock star” gambit.)
For two hours, this machine hits cruise control and rolls along at 70 mph without so much as hitting a pebble in the road. The pacing is remarkably smooth, the dialogue smart and believable, and the inverse paths of the two characters’ careers handled intelligently and credibly. But the ending to this movie, which is very similar to those of previous versions, is rushed to the point that the last big plot event isn’t earned by the story that comes before it. That kind of plot device, even borrowed, needs more justification than it received here, and the way it’s written trivializes the choice that character makes. The script spends more time on the mechanics leading up to that moment – the practical steps the character takes – than on his emotional state and explaining how he came to such a drastic decision.
I’m going to predict, even though it’s early in the season, that A Star Is Born ends up with the most Oscar nominations, with at least nine, including Best Picture Director, Actor, Actress, Song, Cinematography, and some sound awards, while Sam Elliott could grab a nod for Best Supporting Actor in a small but pivotal role as Jackson’s brother and a critical member of his touring team. The concert scenes are incredibly well staged and shot, giving you a sense of the grandeur (and, to me, the anxiety potential) of performing in front of ten or twenty thousand people, yet much of the movie is filmed close – you are often right there with the characters, even when they’re talking to each other, in a way that works to heighten the intensity of arguments and breakdowns throughout the story. The sound in those concert scenes is superb as well, along with the way the film uses sound to bring the recurring bouts of tinnitus that Mayne experiences home to the viewer. It’s not the best film of the year, but it might be the biggest winner come awards season.
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I’m going to reveal the big climactic event in the movie, since it’s worth a separate discussion. It is slightly different from the analogous moment in the three previous iterations of the movie, although in all four U.S. versions of this movie, the Mayne character dies, twice by drowning himself in the ocean, and this time by his own hand but via another method. I understand that in the real world, people do commit suicide for what might seem to an outsider a totally insufficient reason, and they also commit suicide with little to no warning. I’m holding this movie, and others, to a somewhat higher standard: If you’re going to have a character do this, I need to buy it. This time, I didn’t.
In the 1934 original, Norman Mayne’s decision to drown himself comes after a steep decline that was already underway at the start of the film. He’s a successful actor but a known drunk, he’s sozzled when he meets his ingenue Esther, and his career fortunes drop consistently throughout the film, until, near, the end, he’s a has-been and a public laughingstock. When he realizes that he’s destroying Esther’s career, he decides to take his own life. It’s not ‘right,’ of course, but the script spends more than enough time explaining how Norman got to that point.
The new version really doesn’t do that, and I think at least some of the problem comes in the writers’ choices to focus more on Ally’s rise than on Jackson’s fall. Ally gets a lot of screen time after Jackson has made her a star, including a new if unfinished arc about her choice to pursue a more commercial direction than Jackson intended for her career, one where she might be sacrificing some of her artistic integrity to sell more records. The cost of that additional story is that we get less detail to Jackson’s slide; there’s one enormous scene where he embarrasses her at the Grammy Awards (just as Norman Mayne did to Esther at the Oscars), but what follows from there doesn’t really lead to suicide. It’s the point where the film just stops being a great story and starts to rush to connect the remaining dots, so that the last 15-20 minutes don’t live up to everything that’s come before – and it all does so in a way that makes suicide seem like an entirely impetuous, selfish act, instead of the desperate decision of someone suffering from mental illness or great physical pain.