October 5, 2018 3 min to read

A Star is Born

Cooper’s film starring the unmasked Lady Gaga is an agonizing, surprising, flawed but heartfelt examination of stardom.

by Zach Saul

Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born is an emotionally overwhelming, flawed, but ultimately heartfelt interpretation of the 1954 original. We join the drunk but sheepishly endearing Jack (Cooper) after a stadium show wandering into a gay cabaret bar hoping to escape the obligations of stardom for a few hours. Unbenounced to him one of the performers (Ally) is a straight woman singing in french who catches his eye, and Jack woos her in a supermarket parking lot with a bag of frozen peas and a kind ear. After hearing Ally sing, Jack decides to invite her onstage to sing with him and this catapults her career. As the film progresses, Jack fights worsening alcoholism and Ally slowly strays away from the soulful music that caught Jack’s eye originally. The struggle to make sense of their changing identities destroys both Jack and Ally in different ways, and every agonizing tear is shown on screen for us to see.

Cooper’s movie isn’t just about the experience of being famous - but also what it means to love someone who’s famous. Late in the movie when Ally’s career is starting to take off she performs on SNL a song called “Why did You do That” who’s style and content contrast sharply from the songs she was singing in the parking lot with Jack while frozen peas were strapped to her arm. Personally, I didn’t like the song - and read the scene (in which Jack sneers at what Ally has become) as a comment on pop music and it’s vapidness. However, the man who wrote the song bes to differ—Paul Blair says the song wasn’t supposed to be bad. Blair says the scene was about how much Jack resented Ally’s fame and it “doesn’t matter what she wrote — it would have sucked to him”. Ally is endlessly supportive of Jack’s achievements throughout the movie - and stands by him at his worst moments, but he doesn’t extend the same support to her.

Jack very clearly isn’t interested in fame, and goes to great lengths to escape the trappings of stardom. As Ally’s career takes off, he’s conflicted with a jealousy that she’s achieving the success part of him craves, and a guilt that he’s unwittingly dragged her into the prison he’s spent the last 20 years trapped in.

The Good: A Star is Born is shot inventively - and the moments on stage feel really intimate. We feel Jack’s tinnitus, and every drop of nervous sweat on Ally’s forehead. Gaga and Cooper have tremendous chemistry - so much so that Cooper will probably have some questions to answer to his wife Irina Shayk. With the decline of the Rom-Com and the romance genre as a whole it’s rare to see major hollywood actors achieve a romance we earnestly believe - but A Star is Born has done it, and that’s a testament to Cooper’s direction and Gaga’s big screen debut. Cooper felt strongly that Gaga needed to appear “completely open, no artifice” and for a screen test went as far as using a makeup wipe to uncover her face. Kudos to both, the result was intoxicating.

The Bad: A Star is Born contains some scenes that come close to perfect - but a few clunky and unnecessary ones too. Dave Chappelle’s cameo felt strange and out of place - and the long drawn out epilogue where Gaga sings to honor her husband didn’t add to the narrative or deepen our understanding of these two characters.