The first time I saw the trailer for A Star is Born, I cried. Tanned, and greasy haired Bradley Cooper sings and drinks as crowds cheer, but then she appears: Gaga. Dressed as Edith Piaf, in a dark slip with her hair piled on her head. She looks at him, with the thin French eyebrows, and seems to ask, ‘Oh, who me?’
And indeed, aspiring singer Ally, played by Gaga, seems to know exactly who she is and what she is capable of, as she bursts onstage and releases her – now – famous wail. This was the wail that made me cry, as I sat in a dark theatre waiting for another film, suddenly mesmerized.
As a friend told me, this movie is singular in its ability to coalesce gays, barbeque dads, 70s movie buffs, and moms who want to see a film over Thanksgiving. It has, seemingly, something for everybody.
Ally meets Jackson Maine, the famous country singer portrayed by Cooper, at a drag bar where she performs (a setting inspired by Gaga’s early career, and a nod to her queer fanbase). He stumbles into the bar drunk looking for booze after a concert, but ends up backstage with her, drawing her with him across town into the early hours.
It isn’t long before they go on tour together and Ally’s star begins to rise. They romp around the country; Gaga plays a tambourine and dresses like June Carter Cash; crowds chant ‘Ally, Ally, Ally!’
And true to the form of its predecessors (there have been three other A Star is Born’s, including one starring Judy Garland in 1954 and another starring Barbra Streisand in 1976), Ally’s star begins to eclipse Jackson’s. But this review is not about the brilliance of the first act, or Lady Gaga’s uneven but likely to be Oscar-nominated performance.
Rather this is about the film’s weakest act, the final one, and its aesthetic and moral irresponsibility (from here on, this review will have spoilers and will discuss suicide and addiction), which go unaccounted for at the film’s conclusion.
As we learn throughout A Star is Born, Jackson is a man who suffers immensely from the pains of his childhood. To “fill that void,” as Ally describes in the song ‘Shallow,’ Jackson drinks to excess, often blacking out, swaggering even lower in that hunched posture of his. He is an addict – to drugs, to alcohol, to invulnerability, pulling his hat back on as he leaves the stage.
It isn’t until Jackson hits rock bottom that he ends up in rehab, where he gets clean and starts the long process of recovery. The red, alcoholic hue of his face vanishes and it seems, finally, that Jackson might make it out okay. Ally visits Jackson in rehab and reminds him that addiction is a disease – and not his fault.
But poolside, the country singer tells his therapist a funny story about the time he tried to die by suicide as a teen. Laughingly, he describes how he took off his belt and attached it to a ceiling fan. When the fan came crashing down with him, his father was too deep into a drunken stupor to notice. This moment is played for laughter – the therapist laughs along, and so did many in the audience I was sitting in.
The therapist doesn’t take his story seriously; the film makes no mention of depression or mental health. Jackson dies by suicide at the end of the film – and the warning signs were there all along. Early in the film, Ally sings solo at the piano, gazing at her man, ‘I’ll always remember us this way.’
The film, bound on its course provided by the adaptions before it, couldn’t let a man who suffered that much live. He’s doomed, it seems. Love couldn’t fix him – therapy couldn’t do it either. In the end, A Star is Born is a tragedy designed to make its audience cry, as I did again in the final act.
Tragedy serves important societal and cultural functions – it can help us feel less alone in the world, or in that classical idea of catharsis, act out our most shameful, suffering selves and exorcize them (as one film reviewer suggested of Cooper). People die in movies – just as they die in real life.
Art cannot be afraid to depict the worst parts of the human experience – but it cannot take that responsibility lightly.
And this is where this movie fails – in its depiction of the suicide itself and what that suicide means for others.
In the final minutes, we see Jackson’s body hanging through the small window into the garage. Not only is the shot of his body potentially triggering to anyone affected by suicide, it is also needless. There is no good reason to show the body when so much was already made explicit, such as the close shot of the belt in Jackson’s hand, and him closing the garage door. The film would have been more powerful had that scene been closed off to the viewer, without a last, voyeuristic look.
Cooper’s A Star is Born sticks to the original formula - where an ingénue meets an alcoholic who dies an early death. In the Streisand version, the man drives drunk and is killed in a car accident, and in the Garland version, the man drowns himself. This repeated plot, about the nature of creation, dooms addicts to a cycle of tragedy and disappointment.
In these films, the women’s stars are truly born after those moments of loss. In Cooper’s, Ally emerges onstage, a changed artist. Her hair has been dyed back to its original colour from the garish orange of her pop star days, which Jackson hated so much. Through Jackson’s suicide Ally is made a better, more authentic artist.
She appears poised for a new phase of her career – fully fluent at translating her private pain into public consumption. Where before she performed songs called ‘Hair Body Face’ with backup dancers, Ally now bares all, singing with vulnerability, ‘I’ll Never Love Again.’ The film, like the other versions before it, says that suffering is useful and productive for artists. It can allow them to speak more honestly about the human condition. This assertion problematically pairs art and suffering – romanticizing and aestheticizing the suffering of Jackson and Ally to the very end.
For so many that experience addiction and mental illness, this film is a disappointment. It could do so much – it has a responsibility to be better in its aesthetic treatment of suicide, but also the manner in which it pairs tragedy and art.
If you are someone who is affected by suicide, leave the film in the last twenty minutes, or don’t go at all. We need joy in this world.
(19' History, English) is a Canadian with a lot of opinions. Her interests include witchy cackling, thinking about grad school, and Twitter.