'A Star Is Born' Might Be 'Unnecessary' Oscarbait But Cooper & Gaga Still Deliver

A STAR IS BORN

HAAAAAAA AH AHH AHHH AHHHHH! Thanks for the memes, A Star Is Born. The film may not’ve seemed like an inspired idea upon its announcement — or, indeed, when you’re watching it — but, at the very least, the widely-viewed trailer for the shameless Oscarbait drama at least kept the internet entertained.

The resulting movie — roughly 133 minutes longer than its trailer — is much more of a mixed-bag. It’s a film both better and worse than you expect. One that justifies its existence, yet makes you lament the fact that Hollywood keeps making the same old stories, sown with the same old gender roles: Middle-aged man discovers young starlet, makes her famous, meets his manly demise.

The original A Star Is Born came in 1937. Since then, we’ve had the Judy Garland & James Mason version in 1954, the Barbra Streisand & Kris Kristofferson version in 1976, and, now, the Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper version. In making his directorial debut, Cooper proved a sage student of the movie-biz: better to just run back a timeworn idea than come up with a new one.

Cooper — in a film that owes lots to the 1970s version, little to the others — plays a drunken mess who solos endlessly out front of some festival-ready, Black Crowesy southern-rock outfit. With his gravelly mumble, it sounds like he’s doing a Sam Elliott impersonation (the Coop abides!), then Elliott himself just shows up playing Cooper’s brother, manager, and occasional antagonist. Then comes the transformative moment known to Simpsons fans everywhere: hard-drinkin’ in a dive bar, our man is wowed by a singing waitress. This time, it’s a drag bar, and the ingénue belting it out is Gaga, letting loose with a version of La Vie En Rose that may be the film’s highlight.

From there comes the 50 Shades-y romantic entreaties: powerful male forcibly woos regular gal with extravagant gestures of wealth/privilege, standover tactics, sweet talk, marriage proposals. With his patriarchal powers behind her, our aspiring starlet soon becomes famous. Her career takes off, his continues a drunken decline (this old bearded boozehound being ushered aside for handsome young crooners like, um, Marlon Williams!). Soon, the tables are turned, and she must prop him up, soothing his macho ego and using her celebrity to keep him in the public eye. The end is very sad and dramatic. Songs are sung. Tears are shed. A woman is surrounded by men, her beauty and potential profitability being appraised, fate forever in their manly hands.

As old-fashioned work arriving in an era in which hoary gender politics are being critically re-examined, A Star Is Born feels like a throwback to some distant day: a time in which stars were made by men in power, male possessiveness and jealousy went unchecked, everyone’s greatest issues were daddy issues, and weasels in suits, so sure of their creepy conventional wisdom, blithely dictated a woman’s hair-colour and/or career-path. I’m sure there’s real resonance for Lady Gaga, its own star, when she delivers lines about having to walk into boardrooms full of men, who’ll tell her she sounds beautiful but doesn’t look beautiful. In fact, those who saw the documentary Gaga: Five Foot Two may get some feelings of déjà vu watching A Star Is Born, with numerous behind-the-scenes scenes echoing that ‘reality’ once brought to screen.

This feeling is stoked, even moreso, by Cooper’s approach to the film’s drama, the way he directs the actors’ performances. Whilst there’s enough musical montages to make this very multiplex-friendly — including variations on the lamest of all montages: the clip-show of moments we’ve already just seen in the movie — the dramatic scenes in the film are played out with realism, the performances geared towards naturalism, the dialogue playing more like ad-hoc conversation than carefully-penned profundity.

And this is where this A Star Is Born is better than you expect. Though the forcible woo-ing has shades of 50 Shades (Pick-ups by drivers! Private jets! Helicopter flights! Whisking women away into whole-new-worlds!), there’s none of the flat, wooden, dull-eyed line-readings that “sexy” series made so infamous. Instead, Cooper goes deep into gruff-voice character, Gaga essentially plays herself, and the dialogue between them hits our ears as real, be it playful flirtations or resentment-laced arguments.

This means that, at its essence, this completely unnecessary remake feels distinctly human. Which ultimately gives the film a slightly contradictory feeling: a true heart beating inside an ersatz exercise, A Star Is Born is the place where instant memedom meets big-screen, bigger-ballad sincerity.

FIRST MAN

First Man sounds incredible. Not, like, in theory, as concept. I mean literally: it sounds incredible. Damien Chazelle’s depiction of the salad days of the moon-bound US space-program essentially takes an experiential approach: the movie out to convey how it felt to be strapped into what’s, in hindsight, rickety technology; men strapped in sardine tins then shot into the outer limits of — then out of — our atmosphere.

And Chazelle does this — in league with sound designer Ai-Ling Lee — by way of sound. By using sound to orient us, then disorient us. Machinery clanks, the air hisses, everything rattles, heavy breaths pant in our ears. The barriers of sound, their sonic booms, are bent and played with. When things go bad, there’s alarms, whose hectic, insistent bleats convey a feeling of panic, drama, tension. When the climatic moment comes, and Holy Shit, Man Walks On The Fucking Moon, Chazelle conveys its importance, not to mention the eeriness of the void of space, via stark silence.

This wondrous work of sound resounds as symbolic of the whole. First Man is an incredibly-made motion-picture, Chazelle following La La Land — and making his first-ever film that’s not about a jazz musician (shouts to Guy & Madeline On A Park Bench)— with a grand, big-screen, sight-and-sound spectacle that looks and sounds plenty amazing. It’s also very sincere, chronicling not just the experiences of those who journeyed to new frontiers, but the physiological and psychological toil that was part of the job.

Its lead character is that titular First Man, Neil Armstrong. Played by Ryan Gosling with much of his regular quirk and charisma shelved, he’s a taciturn product of his era: a father and breadwinner ill-equipped to deal with, and express, difficult emotions. In the first act, his daughter dies; the film, thereafter, leavening its space-training stuff with a psychological study of a grieving father trapped in an era of masculine emotional repression. This ‘emotional centre’ means that the movie isn’t just a portrait of men-at-work, and, in turn, that Claire Foy isn’t just stuck in a support turn as handwringing housewife; past space-exploration picks like Apollo 13 definitive exemplars of the ‘important men and the women who worry about them’ trope.

Here, she’s allowed agency, a life of her own, and emotions other than just concern/support. Her definitive line, though, may be “we got good at funerals”, something said past-tense, but applicable throughout. First Man is, in title, billing itself as a portrait of Armstrong; coming, as it does, adapted from James R. Hansen’s biography First Man: The Life Of Neil A. Armstrong. But it’s just as much a memoriam for all those who served the space program during the lead-up to the moon landing, and the many men who died along the way.