A few years ago, I was browsing through a DVD bin at Wal-Mart and came across a concert DVD of Lady Gaga. It had pictures of some of her in some of the wild and weird wardrobes she's become synonymous with in her music career. But the one photo that caught my attention was a previous headshot of her without all that. No makeup. No costumes. Just her.
I spent some time listening to snippets of some of her hit songs before attending a screening of A Star Is Born, the latest remake of the 1937 film with Janet Gaynor. (This story of a tragic romance had been made two other times before--in 1954 with Judy Garland, and in 1976 with Barbara Streisand.) It's amazing that after a decade in the music industry with hits like "Poker Face," "Bad Romance," "Born This Way," and "Give Me a Million Reasons" (arguably her best song to date) and starting an acting career with "American Horror Story" and two films directed by Robert Rodriguez, Gaga (born Stefani Germanotta) breaks out on screen with a truly vulnerable and genuine performance opposite Cooper (who makes an impressive directorial debut as well). Gaga even shows echoes of Garland in her performance.
This story of a new talent that rises while another falls is nothing new to the film industry, as already noted. What Cooper and Gaga do with the material (along with co-screenwriters Eric Roth and Will Fetters) is fresh, raw, and phenomenal. Cooper is dynamic and emotionally complex from his opening ballad as country-rock musician Jackson Maine, an alcoholic with progressive hearing loss. But when he inadvertently walks into a drag bar late at night and discovers struggling artist Ally (performing a rendition of Edith Piaf's "La Vie en Rose" in its native French), he's amazed. Almost immediately, when they hang out for the first time, and he hears her write and sing an original song for the first time, it's like magic.
It's perhaps a gross understatement that Gaga's performance fits into the list of other successful leaps that female artists have made in becoming actresses, from Cher to Madonna to Bette Midler and, of course certainly, Streisand. The well-deserved acclaim her performance, in particular, has been getting is overhyped, maybe, but it's no question that when Ally sings, you can almost hear a pin drop (listen to the beautiful "Always Remember Us This Way" and the bittersweet ballad "I'll Never Love Again" and watch her body language). And when she and Cooper sing the now-signature "Shallow" for the first time on stage together (and the music in this film was all reportedly done live, for the record), it's like witnessing a classic movie moment in the making. These are some of the best original songs I've heard in a film since The Greatest Showman last year.
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| Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga knock it out of the park |
As the title of this review indicates, however, this is also a tragic and heartbreaking story. For one thing, it, unfortunately, walks through paths of brief sex scenes, pervasive strong language, and drug and alcohol content to tell its story. It may be about pursuing dreams, as well as understanding (and illustrating) the difference between mere talent and how you use it. When Ally sees a billboard of herself during her growing and promising career, there's a sense that she's forgetting who she is. As Jackson tells her candidly, "If you don't dig deep in your . . . soul, you won't have legs," as if he's trying to warn her. "You just tell them what you want to say [no matter what]," he adds. (She had asked him earlier how he constantly deals with people who talk to him like he's not a real person.)
But A Star Is Born also presents the dark side of fame and a harsh side of reality, in terms of what the industry can do to people (both professionally and emotionally), not to mention romance and the possibility of (figuratively) fading away from the spotlight. Nowhere is this, perhaps, best expressed than in Jackson's guitar ballad, "Maybe It's Time." "You're not going to get back what you lost," argues Jackson's older brother Bobby, regarding Jackson's hearing aids and progressive loss, "It's the only way to help what you still have."
For Jackson and Ally, there seems to be a sense of things happening so fast for them, as musicians and as people. Jackson's "star" predictably falls. Still, we worry hard for him, as Ally unconditionally does; what he's contemplating, and if he's going to fall off the deep end. A Star Is Born also seems to carry the notion of not really knowing people in the spotlight, despite what their music and performances express, if only for a few moments.
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