A Star is Born

Movies, 2018, R

Premise - A famous country music star discovers a songwriter with hidden talent performing in a bar. He insists that she come sing with him on stage, and her career as a performer speedily takes off. As the two fall in love, the trajectories of their careers cross paths, with Ally's on the rise, and Jack's on a fast and wrenching fall.

Review - I did NOT know anything about this movie going in. I knew it had fantastic reviews, and had been remade multiple times (the original was made back in the 1930s), and was about music. Honestly, I thought it was a Dad-film. He likes simple, good-natured love stories, especially ones between struggling musicians. I thought the plot of the movie would be this girl coming out of her shell and learning to be herself on stage with the help of some handsome musician, or something equally cliche and boring. Do not proceed if you have not seen the film because SPOILERS.

I was VERY VERY VERY VERY wrong and almost infuriated because of it. I love sad movies, but usually I go into a sad movie KNOWING it's going to be a sad movie. Coming into this movie expecting a simple romance that instead ends in drug addiction and suicide was brutal. I did not know that Jack was going to die and I was incredibly upset by it. I cried, but they were more angry tears than anything else. I wanted him to live. Even when I saw him grab the belt I thought that maybe he would have an attempt, and then survive. Or change his mind at the last minute. The finality of his death is very difficult to process.

As hard as it was to watch already, I was somewhat left unsatisfied by the lack of a few very key moments. We don't see the moment when he is entered into rehab, or the goodbye between him and Ally when he starts treatment; we just see him in rehab. Moreover, we see his suicide, but we do not see the moment when Ally finds out about his death, or the police, or anyone else. There's this giant gap between the moment he kills himself, and weeks later when Ally is still grieving. I see that perhaps they were avoiding being gratuitous with the emotional drama, but I almost feel it was worse not to show the reaction. It's almost as if the actual suicide is acceptable, but something about the reaction to it is too unbearable to depict on screen. Imagining that scene for ourselves is so much more painful.

Part of why I did not see the tragic ending coming was because I knew this film had been remade several times. It was advertised as a "classic" story. Maybe I'm just not familiar enough with classic cinema, but I don't associate old Hollywood with deep, hard-hitting films. I would think that classic 1930s movies about music would be exceptionally lighthearted and for entertainment purposes only.

The story aged incredibly well. I'm not certain how the original and other adaptations compared as far as details, but the concept of celebrities being unconditionally unhappy and relying on drugs and alcohol to mellow the tortured artist, is timeless.

In the beginning of the film, I had thought that perhaps the story was a bit outdated. That old southern charm is just soooo not my type, and drunks kind of disgust me, so I could not understand Ally's attraction to him. To me, if a celebrity of that nature arrogantly was flirting with me and touching me, I would immediately be turned off. I coined it immediately as grooming behavior - when older, successful men in the music industry, particular producers, pick out young women and "believe in them," investing into their career, in exchange for sex and complete power over them. We see it all the time in real life. The power dynamic was uncomfortably skewed in Jack's favor in the beginning of the film. Of course, as the film progressed, I realized that's the whole point - the power dynamics shift so drastically. Also, the romance becomes more and more substantial, and his motivations so wholesome, that it becomes clear that he was not exhibiting grooming behavior at all. He and Ally were just soulmates.

Ally loved Jack to hell and back. The film had to strike a very careful balance between showing that someone as irresponsible and far-gone as Jack is worthy of the deepest kind of love, but also not excusing his behavior. We see both sides. Ally tells Jack that it's not his fault, that he has a disease, though at the end of the film, the producer tells Ally that she is not to blame for his suicide, and no one is to blame but Jack itself. I generally don't like this idea of blame anyways, but I did appreciate the nuance with which they treated the subject. Ally loved Jack unconditionally and I do not think there was anything problematic about that. In fact, I respect it deeply.

Even as ordinary people, we have real-world examples of this exact scenario to pull from. We may have been entirely detached from the event itself, but as fans of the artist and their work, we also grieved. Ally's final speech and performance gave me immediate flashbacks to Lea Michele's first public appearance after Cory Monteith's death. I was too young to really be affected by Heath Ledger's death, but I imagine there was publicly a very similar reaction. This film, however, gives almost no mention of the public. We know from context that they are an extraordinarily famous and high-profile couple, but their relationship with fame and the public take such a backseat. The film instead focuses so deeply on Ally and Jack alone. I've always had a deep fascination with celebrity culture and what that must be like from an individual perspective. What must it be like to live that life in that world. And stories like this that bring you right up close to it always punch me in the gut.

The implications of the title of the film didn't resonate with me until after the film. One of the friends I was watching with said, "Well, celestially, stars are born out of the deaths of others." (91/100)

**Edit 1/12/2019. Since seeing this, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. I have many of the songs committed to memory. I saw it in theaters a second time. Because of its lasting impact, I'm increasing the score to 94/100.

Quote - "When the sun goes down / And the band won't play / I'll always remember us this way."

What to watch for - Both Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga gave stunning performances, but I swear I would literally give Lady Gaga an Oscar for this role.

If you liked this film, I would recommend Bohemian Rhapsody! Or La La Land!

Directed by Bradley Cooper
Distributed by Warner Bros.

**AFTERWORD:
This entry only refers to the newest adaptation of 2018. The film has four different iterations, the rest of which I have not seen. I did, however, just watch a video comparing each of the four versions and had some new thoughts.

It appears that whats makes this adaptation distinct from the rest is the how Jack's downfall is shifted away from fragile masculinity, and onto substance abuse and depression. Jack (or Norman or whatever he was called in previous renditions) always has a significant downfall in which his career becomes more of an embarrassment than his wife, and he uses alcohol to cope. But the degrees to which his downfall is directly a result of Ally/Esther's success varies. Gender roles are not so much a part in this 2018 film. They could have made a very loud and feminist statement about how problematic it is for a man to be jealous of his wife's career. The problem with that is, in today's day and age, that would make Jack unforgivably unlikable. To keep the love and respect for Jack at the end of the film, he's respectful of women and only a danger to himself. It's more of a film about mental illness than the other adaptations, and there's more of a political statement about how that and his drug addiction still make him worthy. The video I watched called this the result of the rise of the anti-hero in contemporary Hollywood, where we put our love into fictional characters who are clearly very troubled. They also made a comparison to Bojack Horseman, which was incredible because that's literally who I compared Jack to as well.