Movie review: A Star is Born
The story has been told before, but director and star Bradley Cooper’s version of “A Star is Born” is delightfully whimsical and inspirational, with incredible star power to boot.
Cooper’s version of the film is an intimate portrait of the tragedy of love between two people. His interpretation of love and fame is so hard-hitting and confident that the viewer feels they are on the stage performing along with Cooper’s character (country star singer Jackson Maine) and Lady Gaga’s titular character (Ally).
This movie may very well be an instant classic, but only partly due to Gaga’s portrayal of Ally. Cooper utilizes a variety of cinematography adjacent to several cinematic classics such as excellent use of space and time to allow the viewer to see his shots as real-life scenes in a non-linear fashion. With these techniques, Cooper maintains the kind of whimsey that classical Hollywood cinema made famous.
The movie opens with Maine performing rock-inspired country songs to a large, rambunctious crowd. After his show, he stumbles into a drag bar looking for alcohol since his personal supply has run out. Inside the bar, extraordinary Ally performs an exciting interpretation of “La Vie En Rose.” While Ally climbs onto the bar and croons out the last notes of the song, Maine is falling deeply in love with her.
After the show, Maine goes backstage to find Ally taking off her show makeup and asks her to get a drink with him. This is the beginning of their passionate love affair, and at the end of the night, Maine asks Ally to come to his sold-out show the next day. Ally does, and Maine pulls her onto the stage to perform her original duet with him.
As the video of Ally singing at the show goes viral, Maine asks her to tour with him and they perform several shows together. At the end of one of their wildly successful shows, Rez (a celebrity music producer played by Rafi Gavron) approaches Ally and offers to sign her on as a client. After talking with Maine, she accepts his offer, and a star is born.
Ally quickly rises to intense fame, and Maine seems to get lost in the background. Cooper strategically lays out a storyline that allows the viewer to see both the ups and downs of Ally and Maine’s relationship. These ups and downs help the audience feel sympathetic towards both characters, even as their relationship dwindles.
While Cooper takes many risks in his film, the risk that paid off the best was casting Gaga as Ally. With hardly any silver-screen experience, Gaga pulls of an incredibly convincing rising star. Even though Gaga is incredibly famous off the big screen, she portrays a personal and intimate fear of fame incredibly well. It takes a beautiful and true star like Gaga to play such a classic role.
The movie is comparable to the previous versions, and Gaga’s performance certainly lives up to Judy Garland’s even though the two perform wildly different musical genres in their respective films. What was not consistent with the other versions, but delightfully so, was Cooper’s increased narrative and persona he gave to his character. He played his character with such elegance, the viewer cannot help but feel sympathetic for him, an aspect missing in the previous versions of the film. This sympathy is incredibly important to put the viewer inside Ally and Maine’s relationship.
If there is a fault in Cooper’s directing, it is certainly that he often gives too much backstory and explanation to his characters. Bobby (Maine’s brother played by Sam Elliot) and Maine have a severely strained relationship, but Cooper goes into such detail about their past that it turns the viewer off of both characters. The scenes between Bobby and Maine are often random and do not seem to fit in well with the rest of the storyline. It appears Cooper was just looking to make Elliot’s role much larger than it deserved.
In a time that fame may seem diluted with villainous characters and dirty publicity, “A Star is Born” is delightfully refreshing and sobering with more than enough substance to inspire.
— Brianne Sorensen
@SorensenBrianne