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.
