Monthly Archives: October 2018

  • A Star Is Born (2018)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Bradley Cooper (2018)

    In August this year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced a new Oscar category for ‘Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film’.  Within a few weeks, a further announcement followed:  the Academy would not be making the award in 2019 and intended to ‘examine and seek additional input regarding the new category’.  The thinking behind the original proposal was obvious.  Television viewing figures for the Oscar show are continuing to decline, a main reason assumed to be that the year’s most commercially successful movies rarely feature strongly in the nominations.  The Academy first tried to arrest the trend in 2009, when they increased the number of slots available in the Best Picture category from five to a maximum of ten.  All this has done is allow more pieces of typical Oscar fare a Best Picture nod:  box-office hits that aren’t so typical still don’t get a look in.  AMPAS is an increasingly nervy institution and decided to rethink its ‘Popular Film’ award as a kneejerk response to negative media reaction – but that media reaction was right.  The Academy’s idea is as condescending as it’s desperate.  Besides, commercial success is its own reward.  The latest version of A Star Is Born illustrates how superfluous the new category would be.  Bradley Cooper’s film – designed for and already a hit with mainstream audiences – looks likely to receive Oscar nominations in traditional categories.

    The first half is first rate.  Jackson Maine (Cooper), a country rock megastar, is performing somewhere in California.   This opening sequence is the first of several in the movie to convey, from the performer’s point of view, the near-mayhem of playing deafening music to a no less amped-up crowd in a huge arena.  After the show, Jackson asks his driver to take him somewhere, anywhere to get away from his celebrity.  He virtually takes refuge in a drag bar, where he witnesses a spectacular rendition of ‘La vie en rose’.  Although unarguably camp, this isn’t a drag act:  the chanteuse is a young woman called Ally (Lady Gaga).  Jackson is bowled over by her voice and presence.  He goes backstage to meet the girl behind the stylised hairdo and make-up.  Ally, when she isn’t waiting tables (her day job) or revolutionising Edith Piaf numbers, is a singer-songwriter.  She tells Jackson she’s always been dismissed as not pretty enough to show her own face on stage.  He tells her, ‘I think you’re beautiful’.  They spend the night together, though in conversation rather than in bed.  Ally also sings Jackson some of her own material, which confirms to him how talented she is.  By next morning, both realise it’s love at first sight but Ally doesn’t expect things to go much further.  She’s wrong, and the speed at which things then happen – Ally’s professional take-off is even more instant than the romance that develops between her and Jackson – is thoroughly engaging.  It’s incredible that her world can be transformed so rapidly.  Because Lady Gaga shows us that Ally doesn’t believe it either, the transformation is emotionally convincing.

    Although Bradley Cooper said on Graham Norton’s show recently that his film wasn’t like the earlier versions of A Star Is Born, in all essential respects it is.  The credits acknowledge the forerunner scripts.  Cooper’s character has the same surname as the male lead in the 1937 and 1954 films.  As in all three previous movies, the male protagonist is a celebrated performer killing his career with drink and drugs.  He ‘discovers’ and falls in love with a self-effacing, prodigiously gifted unknown, who loves him back.  They marry but it’s not enough to reverse his decline, the pain of which is made more acute by watching his protégée’s meteoric rise to stardom.  Cooper retains the garish sequence in which the newcomer wins the relevant entertainment industry’s top award (an Oscar in 1937 and 1954, a Grammy in 1976 and now) only for her drunken other half to upstage her acceptance speech.  In terms of basic plot, the 1976 version was more of a departure than this one:  the Kris Kristofferson character dies in a road accident – the result of reckless driving but not the conscious suicide of the men played by Fredric March, James Mason and Bradley Cooper.  This film, like all the others, ends with the heroine emerging from grieving solitude to appear at a big public event, where she pays dignified tribute to her late husband.

    A Star Is Born is, in short, still the morbid showbiz melodrama it has always been.  As a result, Cooper’s film is less involving as it goes on:  for anyone familiar with one or more earlier versions, this one suffers from Stations-of-the-Cross syndrome.  It benefits, though, from relative compactness:  the running time of two-and-a-quarter hours is a few minutes less than the 1976 abomination (which I’ve never got through) and quite a bit shorter than the 1954 film[1].   Familiarity also breeds respect:  if you’ve seen other incarnations, you can appreciate better what a decent job Cooper has done within the limits of the material.  It works well that Jackson has to contend with tinnitus, as well as the traditional addictions (surprising he doesn’t have photophobia too, after years of exposure to stadium lighting.)  There are interesting aspects to the development of his and Ally’s relationship – Jackson is saddened rather than bitterly resentful that success leads her to becoming someone else’s musical property.  For once, the awards-night horror show leaves its mark on the Maine man:  when Ally visits Jackson in rehab, he weeps with guilty shame (Bradley Cooper makes this affecting).   A tough and traumatising upbringing is hardly a novelty in musical biopic but at least giving Jackson this kind of backstory attributes his personal problems to more than the Price of Fame.

    A major aspect of this film with which I was unfamiliar is Lady Gaga.  I’ve heard a few of her songs and seen clips of her performing but no more than that.  Every viewer of A Star Is Born is witnessing her acting debut; for this viewer, it was almost her singing debut too.  As a result, she has, onstage and off, a freshness and credibility as a showbiz nobody that were inevitably far beyond the reach of Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand:  for me, Gaga is almost literally an unsung heroine.  Her acting seems a little overeager at first but she soon settles down to give an appealing, open-hearted performance.  She and others, most notably Diane Warren, Mark Ronson and Lukas Nelson (Willie’s son), wrote songs for the film.  I’m not sure if ‘Shallow’ and the other original tracks count as country rock or power ballads or something else but I don’t much care for this kind of music.  So it says a lot for Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, who does his own singing too, that the songs are sometimes stirring, thanks to their chemistry and the strength of their characterisations.

    This is Cooper’s first time out as a feature film director.  In the first few seconds, as Jackson Maine goes on stage, the camera cuts, as if confidentially, to the drink and the pills he’ll down before he starts performing.  It’s an early clue that the direction won’t err on the side of subtlety.  The surfeit of close-ups and handheld camerawork throughout are telltale signs of a movie-maker anxious to show he knows how to make a movie.   But Cooper’s storytelling is assured, there are effective changes of pace and he handles the cast well.  There are two key supporting roles:  Sam Elliott is increasingly strong as Jackson’s elder brother and manager; Rafi Gavron, as the hotshot music producer who takes over Ally’s career, is relatively limited but not to a damaging extent.  Cooper’s own acting is excellent, especially in the layers that he creates to Jackson’s feelings for Ally.  It’s true that he gives himself the lion’s share of dramatic highlights and ensures that the cinematographer Matthew Libatique lights his face to optimum effect – but when an actor is as skilled and has eyes as expressive as this, you don’t complain.   If the movie is a vanity project, it’s one that entailed extraordinary industry on Cooper’s part.  As well as directing and starring, he produced, co-wrote the screenplay (with Eric Roth and Will Fetters) and had a hand in writing a few of the songs.  It’s fair to say that Bradley Cooper has made the best musical version[2] of A Star Is Born to date – but that’s damning with faint praise.  It’s also fair to say that he has made a good film.

    5 October 2018

    [1] The exact difference depends on which version of the 1954 film is the comparator:  the premiere ran 182 minutes; the movie that went on general release was 154; the ‘restored version’ is 176.

    [2] I’ve not seen William A Wellman’s non-musical version (1937) with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, or What Price Hollywood? (1932), on which the Wellman film draws.

     

  • The Old Man & the Gun

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Lowery (2018)

    In the Q&A that followed a preview of A Ghost Story at Curzon Soho last year, the few words David Lowery said about his next film were enough to make clear how much he admired Robert Redford and saw The Old Man & the Gun as a tribute to him.  Redford indicated in late 2016 that this movie would be his acting swansong; he confirmed it this August  – the month of his eighty-second birthday and in which The Old Man & the Gun had its world premiere at the Telluride festival.  Lowery’s crime comedy, for which he also wrote the screenplay, is based on an article of the same name by David Grann, published in the New Yorker in 2003.  The old man of Grann’s profile was Forrest Tucker, a career criminal and serial prison escape artist, who was still robbing banks at the age of seventy-nine.  (Tucker died in jail in 2004.)  Commemorating Robert Redford in the role of a lawbreaker might seem fitting in view of the characters he played in two of his most commercially successful films, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, both directed by George Roy Hill.

    This certainly isn’t the only way of representing the actor, though; and my immediate reaction was to regret it was the one Lowery had chosen.  In the 1970s, Redford was just as much the go-to leading man for politically serious drama (The Candidate, Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men).  He’s been memorable too as the unattainable heart’s desire of strong and strongly played women characters (Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were, Meryl Streep in Out of Africa).  Pauline Kael dismissed The Sting as a film for ‘people – and no doubt there are quantities of them – who like crooks as sweeties’.  Count me out:  longstanding antipathy to the cinema of lovable rogues made me apprehensive about seeing The Old Man & the Gun at the London Film Festival and there’s no doubt that Lowery glamorises the protagonist.  Yet his film is highly entertaining and enjoyable.

    Much of the action takes place in the second half of 1981, when Forrest Tucker is carrying out his latest series of bank robberies.  (He wasn’t yet sixty at the time so the fact that Redford doesn’t look his age helps considerably.).  Tucker uses a standard technique.  He wears a suit, tie, fedora, false moustache and hearing aid; he looks a respectable elderly gent.  When he enters a bank, he asks for the manager and then about a loan.  In answer to the question what kind of loan, Tucker replies, ‘This kind’, and points a gun, though he never pulls the trigger.  Bank staff then fill his brief case with cash and he exits quietly.  He sometimes works alone, sometimes with two accomplices (Danny Glover and Tom Waits).  The ‘Over the Hill Gang’, as they’re dubbed by police and media, start in Texas and move on to Oklahoma and Missouri.  (The screen shows the exact location, date and time – to the minute – of each heist.)  The investigating police team in Dallas is headed by the aptly named John Hunt (Casey Affleck).  As the geographical scope of the bank jobs widens, federal agents, to Hunt’s chagrin, also get involved.

    Lowery is romanticising Robert Redford rather than Forrest Tucker.  When Hunt looks at photos of the young Tucker, we see photos of the young Redford.  Lowery inserts a brief clip of him in Arthur Penn’s The Chase (1966) into a chronologically ordered montage of the hero’s prison escapes (the total is well into double figures).  Tucker’s chance meeting with a widow called Jewel (Sissy Spacek) starts a relationship that’s central to the story.  He tells her that his name is Bob.   Jewel keeps horses; Tucker says that riding one is on his bucket list and ticks it off the list immediately before the police eventually arrest him.  Being in the saddle may be a new experience for Tucker but not for the Bob playing him.  Throughout the film, Lowery takes every opportunity to focus on his leading man’s well-preserved face, more or less knowing that he’ll be the last filmmaker to have such an opportunity.

    It’s something of an irony that you keep thinking Redford is rather miscast.  Even though David Grann described Forrest Tucker as ‘a striking-looking man, with intense blue eyes’, the mug shots of the real Tucker online suggest he was no oil painting.  Movie transformations of real people into more conventionally attractive actors are legion but there’s a particular issue here when, at their first meeting, Jewel says to Tucker, with friendly amusement, ‘Look at you all dressed up in your blue suit!’  There’s a suggestion that his old codger lineaments and natty outfit are a humorous mismatch – that Tucker, unused to dressing smartly except when he’s on a job, overdoes the dapper look to almost comical effect.  With Redford in the role, that’s not the case:  this handsome octogenarian wears well in all respects.  But although this is niggling on a realistic level, it makes sense in terms of the film’s essential subject.  Being better-looking than the original has been an enduring, almost inevitable criticism of casting Robert Redford as real-life characters, from Bob Woodward through Denys Finch Hatton to Bill Bryson.

    The strength of Lowery’s desire to celebrate Redford is a big part of what makes The Old Man & the Gun likeable.  And Redford’s variously distinguished service to American cinema, combined with his longevity as a star, makes him worth celebrating:  for his support for independent cinema through the Sundance festival etc; as a director, for continuing to choose subjects that were personally important to him.  I’ve often found him exasperatingly self-protective as an actor, the exasperation greater because the evidence of his natural gifts has convinced me he could go further.  Wearing a suit that looks OK on him and is too tasteful for Forrest Tucker is typical of this side of Redford.  The kind of intelligence he projects is perhaps too sophisticated for Tucker.  Yet his trademark reserve and a performing style far removed from character acting are assets here.  Redford is effortlessly charming.  He doesn’t work to make Tucker appealing.

    Two other factors help The Old Man & the Gun rise above the ‘crooks as sweeties’ level.  David Lowery interrogates – though only gently – the cliché of the incorrigible rogue.  There’s the odd moment when Tucker’s face registers that threatening someone with a gun is in itself a vicious, terrorising act.  According to a sheriff (Daniel Britt) who once arrested him, Tucker justified his recidivism not as a way of making a living but as ‘living’:  his eventual decision to leave the loyal Jewel to make a criminal comeback confirms a virtual addiction to daylight robbery.  Television news reports on the Over the Hill Gang are delivered in a jocose, patronising tone.  These are senior citizens so they must be innocuous.  This makes us realise that’s how we, as an audience, see them too.  The other, more important means of lifting the film is John Hunt and the actor playing him.

    According to a piece on Slate[1], the real Hunt ‘played a more minor role … he was not a detective from Dallas but a sergeant with the Austin police’.  Lowery enlarges his importance in the story both to rework the crime-movie trope of the law officer who develops respect for a lawbreaking adversary and to create a dual character study.  Lowery’s regular collaborator Casey Affleck is the ideal choice to complement the film’s easy, genial aspect.  He grounds the police pursuit of Tucker in hard-slog reality:  Hunt, who ‘celebrates’ his fortieth birthday at the start of the story, is conscientious but jaded at work.  What works so well is that Lowery combines this with a family life for Hunt that’s happy and secure.  His wife Maureen (Tika Sumpter) and their two young children (Ari Elizabeth Johnson and Teagan Johnson) know he’s inclined to be a grouch and don’t love him any less for that.  Affleck’s physical acting is expressive at every level.  In an early scene, as Maureen greets Hunt on his return from work, we see – though it’s conveyed without any dramatic emphasis – how much he takes refuge in her embrace.  (This couple are a welcome instance of a rare screen phenomenon – an interracial marriage that’s never remarked upon.)  In a subsequent sequence, Hunt, sitting in his kitchen, turns a dial to change stations on a radio just behind him.  Affleck does this so naturally that it registers as part of Hunt’s routine – a small detail but one that enriches the picture of his domestic world.

    Casey Affleck isn’t known as a great smiler:  when his growing fascination with Tucker causes Hunt occasionally to grin and even laugh out loud, it drives home how much difference the old man is professionally re-energising the middle-aged one.  David Lowery melds the real world of Hunt/Affleck and the crime caper form smoothly:  the two sequences in which Tucker and Hunt are on screen at the same time are amusing conceits, staged in a way that makes them seem credible.  Hunt and his son happen to be in a bank just as a robbery is going on there – the manager (Gene Jones) announces this to his customers after Tucker has left the building.  Later on, Hunt and his wife, on the spur of the moment, go out to eat at a place where Tucker and Jewel are also sharing a table.  The exchange between Redford and Affleck, when the two men meet face to face in the gents, is a comic delight.  Confronting Tucker, Hunt doesn’t attempt to arrest him but other officers are soon on Tucker’s tail and it’s during the next few hours that he’s apprehended.  Earlier on, Hunt’s daughter warned her father that, ‘If you caught him, you wouldn’t get to chase him anymore’ and she was right.  Maureen thinks she’s commiserating when she tells her husband she’s sorry he’s not the one who arrested Tucker.  ‘I’m not’, is the eloquent reply.

    The first-rate supporting cast includes Elisabeth Moss (in a single scene as the daughter Tucker hasn’t seen since she was a babe in arms), Keith Carradine, John David Washington and Isiah Whitlock Jr.  It’s especially good to see Sissy Spacek again.  Her Jewel – good-humoured, observant, quietly rueful – is a lovely partner for Redford.  Spacek’s delivery of an affecting monologue about getting older is particularly fine.  David Lowery’s screenplay is well constructed and features excellent dialogue:  each character has an individual voice.  The direction is even more impressive.  It may not have been difficult to make a film remarkably different from the singular A Ghost Story but the combination of momentum and relaxation in Lowery’s storytelling here is close to elating.  The Old Man & the Gun is not just a graceful last bow for Robert Redford but confirmation of the talent of a still young movie-maker (Lowery is thirty-seven).  To my surprise, this turned out to be one of those films that make me grateful that I love films and for how long I’ve loved watching them.

    13 October 2018

    [1] https://slate.com/culture/2018/09/the-old-man-and-the-gun-fact-vs-fiction-robert-redford-movie.html

     

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