Seeing A Star is Born with Wife, Friend, and his mother-in-law was the culmination of weeks of whispering back and forth to each other in the trailers of films in order to figure out what the hell Bradley Cooper is singing in “Out of Time“: “I’m something something… / I’m longing for change”??? A few weeks ago, we had no way of knowing, no lyric notes or recordings of the songs, and then all of sudden here was Lady Gaga clearly enunciating the song as if everyone else was dying to hear it from someone who wasn’t drunk and blasted on downers. I feel like learning the correct lyrics to that song was worth the price of admission, but there were a few other buried treasures in this film that made it, if not fresh (can the third remake of a film be “fresh”?), at least creative. (The stuff I want to talk about it is mostly spoilers, so let’s reconvene after you’ve seen it.)
The first ten minutes, starting with the scene with Jack in the car as the billboard behind him rolls past the window, a rainbow with nooses in shadow, while he talks his driver through finding a place to top up his empty bottle of vodka, is lovely. It tumbles into a funny, unexpected place (caveat) at the bar he walks into: “This isn’t really your kind of place, man.” “Does it serve booze? Then it’s my kind of place.” The metatheatricality, the performance of gender, and the deconstruction of that performance are all included on stage and backstage in that bar scene. Cooper’s decision to play the initial scenes of courtship a little raw–ambient noise and Ally and Jack more than once leaning in, not quite able to hear, and asking the other to repeat what they were saying–is the perfect counterpoint to the other bookend of the film.
The second interesting contribution of this film is the way in which Jack demonstrates his affection for Ally is really romantic and surprising. We think that he’s just trying to dazzle her with the driver taking her to the private jet and then when she arrives backstage, he reveals that he’s arranged the song she composed for him in the parking lot when he doesn’t seem to be listening in a creative capacity. “You’re not used to people asking you questions about yourself, are you?” Ally teases the first night they meet each other. Bradley Cooper does a tremendous job playing the reticent, coy, charming rockstar with a dark streak. The prominence of his tumble into self-destruction is what Friend described as the most surprising thing in the film–“I thought it was going to be more about her rise to fame.” Wife says that he did a good job of delineating when he was wasted from when he was sober based on his physicality, which I think is on the nose.
The third contribution is the fraternal relationship between Bobby (played by Sam Elliot) and Jack. Their vast age difference makes it hard to even identify who he is when we first meet him holding up ear plugs for Jack during rehearsals. It’s hard for us to connect the fact that he’s the same older brother that Jack raised when he was only thirteen–and that ambiguity holds until Arizona, the visit to the farm, and their confrontation. Their final two interactions together are the perfect manifestations of the austere and lonely offices of love: the slow and subtle reveal of Jack’s deteriorating hearing at SNL and the look on Bobby’s face as he pulls out of the driveway.
Having talked about those gems, there are two related failures of imagination in the film that are worth discussing:
1. Suicide as plot resolution. (Tvtropes has some surprisingly helpful notes about the common distortions of suicide in media, along with some on the nose explanation of the trope in action.)
I’m a big advocate for the end of suicides as plot resolution, because of how uninteresting and sloppy they are. When a character kills himself there’s no chance for him to learn or grow. Wife makes the point that Jack’s suicide is his only escape from being a fool, the memory of him pissing himself on live television. He gets to leave with grace instead of having to fuck up again or reform. 3 Billboards in Ebbing, MO provides a good model for how suicide can be used successfully: suicide is not a finale, it’s the start of a second act (although Tvtropes describes how that in itself is a trope). It’s confusing and sudden and we need to be able to watch the survivors pick up the pieces, feel anger, regret, hopelessness, relief. Louie CK has a memorable exchange in his series back in 2015 (how long ago that feels now) with a suicidal person that I reflect on a lot when thinking about the peculiar reverence with which suicide is handled in our culture’s art and dramatic discourse. Worse than the narrative thud that Jack’s death ends the story with is the fact that its perceived effect is to fill all of Jack’s previous positive interactions with Ally with maudlin edginess. Jack knows where he is going, which means we can see in retrospect how he was acting all along–the stuff of an instant classic with rewatchability. In reality, the end deadens the romantic story in some ways, which is the second failture of imagination.
2. Wife thinks that it would’ve been more interesting to have Ally take a firmer line on Jack: instead of saying it’s okay, it’s not your fault, it’s a disease when she visits him at detox, she should’ve said it is a disease, but it isn’t okay, and it is your fault. Ally’s pain and betrayal required a more complicated reaction to Jack’s relapses, especially after she initially puts her foot down. Instead she’s the lone flat character in a movie with dynamic performances. We have the brother on the one end of the spectrum when dealing with Jack, who is enabling and unable to address underlying problems, and the music producer on the other end who’s too far in the other extreme, but there’s no middle ground, which is what Jack really needs.
A Star is Born will not disappoint you musically, but there are times when it feels, especially in its third act, as if the script went for low lying fruit rather than fully engaging with difficult moral decisions.
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