Tuesday, November 6, 2018

"A Star Is Born"

 ½ 

Ally is a nobody waitress with a voice of gold, Jack is a superstar singer whose addictions are getting the best of him. Sound familiar? It should, because this is the fourth time A Star Is Born has been made in Hollywood, and even though more than 80 years have passed since the first attempt, the story hasn't changed much.

The trouble with that this time around is that Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper create rich, carefully observed characters who are endlessly fascinating for about the first 45 minutes of the movie, and just as we're really falling in love with both of them and their complexities, they start living A Star Is Born.

We've seen the story before, over and over; we haven't seen these characters, and as A Star Is Born raced toward its inexorable conclusion I found myself wishing time and again that something different would happen to these particular people.  These characters deserve a more interesting, more challenging fate than the same one to befall Judy Garland and James Mason, Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, et. al.

The first time we see Cooper's Jackson (not Norman) Maine, he's on stage performing in front of an adoring audience, but he looks and acts tired of it all. He's too used to being a star, but he navigates the trappings of stardom with ease, especially as a passenger in the back of an SUV limo whose driver is the closest thing he's got to a friend. After the concert that opens the movie, Jackson needs a drink, so the limo pulls up in front of a grungy dive that turns out to be a drag bar.

Jackson doesn't mind, and in one of the movie's many nice little grace notes, he seems to enjoy the camaraderie of the bar and its patrons. Up on stage comes Ally, the only biological woman in the place and the only live singer, and immediately Jackson is entranced. It's easy to see why: Lady Gaga seems uncharacteristically average in these opening scenes, and as she's already proven in Five Foot Two, her simultaneously candid and self-absorbed documentary, Lady Gaga can seem disarmingly ordinary.

They share a long scene in a supermarket parking lot that feels a lot like two superstars imagining what it would be like to be anonymous again, marveling at the way everyone knows who they are but no one knows what they're like. Jackson asks her to call him Jack. This relaxed, revealing, completely captivating scene holds the tantalizing promise of turning A Star Is Born into an intimate conversation like the Before movies.

But it's A Star Is Born.

He's going to make her famous. She's going to try to get him to stop drinking and doing drugs. As she rises, so he will fall, ultimately humiliating her, but she will stand by her man, and he will become convinced his own fame is holding her back, and the movie will play the way A Star Is Born always plays, and it will prove as simultaneously beguiling and disappointing as listening to Lady Gaga perform a cover of an old standard: With so many more interesting opportunities, why choose the safest ones?

Because A Star Is Born demands it. There's no doubt most of it is played very, very well, with the exception of an onerous little creep named Rez, who becomes Ally's manager and turns her into a bubble-gum pop-music sensation. The scenes with Rez are the movie's weakest moments, which isn't the fault of actor Rafi Gavron, who plays him as all slime and artifice; the problem is that Lady Gaga and Cooper play their roles with real conviction, and their characters insist on authenticity. Her sellout into music superstardom feels contrived and overplayed -- certainly the world today knows celebrities who don't rise to the top by giving in so easily.

So little about the film's middle is believable that it's disconcerting to compare it with the sheer force of personality in the first act.  By the time A Star Is Born gets to the only place it is allowed to go, it feels even less convincing -- it's a story of fame and addiction that shows its age; would anyone in the movie act the way they do if the plot didn't demand it?

Perhaps in the hands of a lesser director and lesser stars it would have been less problematic for the film to wind up in precisely the place A Star Is Born must wind up, but is that a reason, in 2018, to force Ally into a place of having to choose between her career and her man, of ending up in the same place as the character did 80 years ago, feeling weakened yet strengthened by avoidable tragedy?  The film seems so stuck in its old self that there are times when you wish Ally and Jack would just sit down and watch A Star Is Born to see where it's all headed.

None of that, strangely enough, is reason not to see A Star Is Born, or to marvel at its wonderful soundtrack, or to imagine the acting career ahead of Lady Gaga, or to enjoy the remarkable chemistry of the two leads. Indeed, there's not too much wrong at all with A Star Is Born ... except that it's A Star Is Born, that old chestnut, roasted and served up again with the same bittersweet flavor it's always had.



Viewed November 5, 2018 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks

1945

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