The narcissist and the singer

Rating: 3/10 (9 October 2018)

Mark my words: Bradley Cooper's A Star is Born is going to win a bunch of awards this fall, and for all the wrong reasons.
Cooper is playing a successful rock-star (complete with addictions) and he has the look down to Hollywood perfection, long greasy-but-attractive hair and husky mid-western growl. He sounds about right too as a singer (and people will marvel at the work he's put into vocal and stage training) but his soul isn't quite there. He's manufactured a contradiction: a boozy self-destructive drug addict who always stays clean and agreeable. In a scene intended to show his lowest point, he pisses himself, drunk onstage at the Grammy's, but even that moment is presented tastefully. His urine has no stink or colour.
When Bette Midler played a fictionalized version of Janis Joplin in The Rose, you could smell the sweat and the substances, and that performance really stabbed you. She was exactly the right performer for the material (a fully-developed script by Bo Goldman), and she was directed (miraculously by Mark Rydell) to her full potential, and then some.
Lady Gaga does come alive when she's singing, but her scenes here don't amount to anything. They're snippets of a characterization, and you're not sure whether the inferior script or the underlying sense of self-control is responsible. She seems to be acting with one eye on the monitor. My guess is it's as much a Gaga project as it is Cooper's. Again moviegoers and fans alike will gasp at the self-proclaimed (and I think highly self-monitored) de-glamorization of Gaga, a performer known for visual hyper-creativity, and mistake it for mastery. She's also the wrong person to begin with: who can buy a performer so over-exposed and self-exposed as Lady Gaga as a reluctant newcomer? It just feels dishonest on her behalf.
Very early in the film I became so disengaged that I started thinking about why I didn't feel anything. About an hour in it struck me: every time Cooper and Lady Gaga were onscreen together it felt like the first time, like two actors who'd never met (their characters often acting surprised to see each other without explanation also created consistent gaps in continuity). Whether this is intentional to allow improvisation isn't clear, but I was constantly longing for a connection that wasn't there. The words weren't there on the page, and the two star performers kept acting out their own narcissistic movie.