A Star Is Born

The boredom that set in during my watch of Bradley Cooper’s retread of A Star Is Born came after the first hour or so, when our heroes have well fallen in love and the script, co-written by Eric Roth and Will Fetters with Cooper, must decide what will jeopardize paradise. That first leg of Cooper’s directorial debut, though, is well edited, with Cooper and Lady Gaga having a certain ease and collective charisma with one another onscreen that is appealing.

The film begins aurally. A stadium crowd clamors for a drunken Jackson Maine (Cooper), a not-quite-country singer whose demeanor suggests a lost Allman brother. We hear the crowd meld with the ringing in Maine’s ear. Like many rockers, he has a hearing problem (except his apparently dates back to childhood?). Already we feel like we’ve been here before with Jeff Bridges’ turn in Crazy Heart, a better movie in some respects. Cooper’s camera keeps us on the stage. The point-of-view character is not Jackson or his love, Ally (Gaga), rather, it’s The Performer.

After being dunked into what Maine’s life is like — drink, perform, stumble on to the next town — we meet Gaga’s Ally in a hilariously large bathroom at her job, some kind of banquet hall or large restaurant. Chambered in a stall, she argues with some boyfriend who clumsily proposes marriage over the phone. Ally wisely breaks up with him. Then she walks to the center of the room and engages in a primal scream. Gaga gives Ally a self-assurance that sometimes almost becomes a tough-guy sneer. When she’s not hauling garbage in food service, she’s an aspiring singer who performs in a drag queen bar, the only cis-woman so honored, we’re told. All this is handled more or less with directorial alacrity. Cooper is a careful director, backing his way into painterly shots without being too precious.

Maine leaves a gig and instructs his loyal driver to find a bar. When he finds it to be a drag queen spot, he reacts with vaguely woke equanimity. Hey, they serve booze, says his body language. Jackson is recognized by Ally’s friend (Anthony Ramos) who announces that his pal from work will perform presently. Drink in hand, Jackson is riveted by Ally Gaga’s table-walking rendition of “La Vie en Rose.” Shuffling through a thicket of starstruck drag queens — Maine signing a set of fake breasts is one of many cheap laughs had at a drag performers’ expense — he finally meets Ally, who is self-confident as a person, self-possessed as a performer, but somehow freighted with self-doubt as a songwriter. They flirt and are immediately off on an impromptu first date.

To my surprise, I bought the central relationship here. Cooper and Gaga engage in the sort of drunken-first-date banter that is realistic in its inanity. The over-share and over-praise one another. Although in every scene, someone eventually outright states the point of the scene, with dialogue stuffed with character backstory. Maine eventually has his driver stalk Ally, waiting outside her family home, where she lives with Andrew Dice Clay who plays her dad, to deliver her to Jackson’s next gig. In one of many twists we see coming a country mile away, their post-gig consummation is postponed due to Jackson passing out drunk. He is tucked in by another trusted handler, played by Sam Elliot, who, though used sparingly, is fiery with unspoken emotion and utterly believable.

Once the story shifts, as it must in every A Star Is Born iteration, from two artists falling in love to two artists dealing with the tribulations of their relationship in the context of one partner’s growing fame, Cooper loses the tight control that characterized the first third of the film. Where once the editing was impressionistic and judicious, things become tedious and long-winded. Whole conversations with side characters delivering minor background information are handled as if they carry essential information. As the eternal story wears on, and Ally goes from viral sensation to Grammy-nominated pop star, Cooper becomes too indulgent. The characters tend to say exactly what’s on their minds in a way that grows into stale predictability.

We already know she can sing, and in A Star Is Born she does so beautifully. (Cooper, on the other hand, is not a professional singer, which is evident not in the notes he hits or doesn’t hit but in the professional-musician confidence that his voice lacks. E.g., Gosling in La La Land.) But Gaga achieves a naturalism in the non-singing scenes that is, in fact, the thing that made me believe her as Ally. Gaga’s best acting moments are those when Ally is worked up about something, joking around in bar early on or becoming angry with Jackson while she soaks in a bath. You only see her acting in the smaller, quieter moments, particularly early on, wherein there’s no extreme emotion happening, just conversing at work, etc.

The film gives so much backstory to Jackson and Ally that other questions that pop up go unaddressed. Ally appears to be a tri-state area chick who performs in drag bars, whereas Jackson is a country-rock fusion singer from Arizona who wears a cowboy hat (although not onstage) and speaks with a low, rumbling twang. Do they share the same values? Additionally, would not their musical tastes not quite aligning be more of a problem, at the very least, a conversation? Such practical questions, the film seems tacitly to argue, are rendered moot when two people are “in love.”

The effect for which the film is shooting is one of alternately swooning and crying. But I found the second half of A Star Is Born to be maudlin. Cooper elongates the sad scenes with such melodramatic deliberateness that one feels almost assaulted. And with the exception of a tune called “Shallow,” the songs, some of which co-written by Cooper himself, are lyrically underwhelming. Of course, the Academy likes swooning and star-making and actors directing. The Oscar swamis have predicted that this thing will clean house on the awards circuit. The best thing one can say this time of year is that the Academy could do worse. Perhaps they will.

A Star Is Born — TWO STARS

Directed by Bradley Cooper

Rated R

Warner Bros.

137 min.

You Were Never Really Here

As a movie star, Joaquin Phoenix effects a wild strangeness that, when properly exploited (as in Inherent Vice and The Master), is bewitching. At his best, Phoenix seems to be less acting than working out some kind of inner struggle that finds its expression in the character he happens to be playing.

Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here (based on Jonathan Ames’ novella, well adapted by Ramsay) owes much of its overall effect to its lead. It seems the film is adjusting itself in real time to the idiosyncrasies of its star rather than the actor attempting to discover what “works” for a given scene. Ramsay shoots close-ups of Phoenix, who plays a hitman of sorts named “Joe,” with a documentarian’s alertness, as if Phoenix’s gestalt is the meaning-making engine for the film itself.

Ames’ story is one of political intrigue that focuses on the moral depravity that attends the powerful. Joe is a war veteran who still lives at home with mother (Judith Roberts). Scarred from past experiences we see only in literal glimpses, Joe purposely lives under the radar, wearing black hats and hoodies and taking public transportation to meet with associates. He is a hitman/one-man rescue crew who specializes in recovering underage sex slaves. We’re never told a drop of this. In today’s Hollywood landscape, Ramsay is a bizarro storyteller who insists upon visual declarativeness and verbal circumlocution. The images tell the story, while the characters speak in riddles. What’s appealing about her work is that she’s utterly unwilling to allow a plot, with all its cumbersome details, to get in the way of a good story.

As we follow Joe to his next job — a state senator would like his daughter Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov) recovered from kidnappers — it becomes clear Joe isn’t in this line of work for superhero rationales. He’s not out to right wrongs. Joe is messed up. And if one is messed up the way he is, violence for hire is about all one can do. “I hear you’re brutal,” the state senator says. Joe’s good with a pistol, but his weapon of choice is a ball-peen hammer. Without judgment, Ramsay allows us to tag along as Joe lovingly picks one out at the hardware store.

As Joe pursues his targets — hammering, shooting, and duct taping them — and then is pursued himself, the film becomes obsessed with elongating moments. The typical scene in which an (anti-)hero interrogates a dying person for information becomes a kind of reverie in which the passage of time is as important as the divulged information. A diegetic song on the radio, in the background, begins to bubble to the foreground before taking over the entire scene. Instead of commenting on the action, the song hijacks it. Likewise, the entire tone of the film is one of overheard music. (Ramsay’s composer here was Jonny Greenwood, who has a knack for creating sound schemes that simultaneously feel both faraway and emphatic.)

Unsurprisingly, the politicians are all even more depraved than we’d originally been lead to believe. And Joe sleepwalks through his existence, living as much in his internalized trauma as he does in the external world. Both Joe and Nina have an understanding that is never spoken as much as transmitted through osmosis. They were both made by violence, trapped by it, and subsequently use violence to free themselves, and one another.

You Were Never Really Here — FOUR STARS

Directed by Lynne Ramsay

Rated R

Amazon Studios

90 mins.

The Top Ten Films of 2016

This year, there were many films that almost made my top ten list. I usually find these things easy, but not in 2016. This was a year of top-notch runners-up. They include “Little Sister,” “Toni Erdmann,” the unforgettable “The Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” and Pedro Almodovar’s sumptuous “Julieta.” Leaving off Terence Davies’ “Sunset Song” was an all-time heartbreaker for me.

10) “Arrival”

Denis Villeneuve’s parlor trick of a film ends up being a pretty neat, thematically smart parlor trick. Amy Adams has garnered nominations for what is a mostly unremarkable performance, but the real hero here is Eric Heisserer’s screenplay, which achieves what Christopher Nolan is always after without the pomp and circumstance.

9) “Nocturnal Animals”

“Nocturnal Animals” is the kind of film Hitchcock would have liked. A woman (Amy Adams again) reads a novel manuscript written by her ex-husband (Jake Gyllenhall) and find herself moved deeply by a story of brutality and loss that stands as an analog for their long dissolved marriage. Michael Shannon rings up one of the year’s most under-praised performances as a local police investigator who stopped giving a good god damn years ago.

8) “Hell or High Water”

David Mackenzie’s “Starred Up” was a good film, but his follow up is better. Chris Pine and Ben Foster are two Texas boys, brothers and bank robbers being pursued by a sherrif (Jeff Bridges). Simple. Exquisitely directed. Like Godard said, all you need to make a movie is “a girl and a gun.”

7) “Elle”

Paul Verhoeven’s half-crazy essay on trauma and identity seems calibrated to scandalize just about anyone who watches it. That’s because it is. But there’s more going on here than mere button-pushing for the sake of. Good art is composed of ideas, but sometimes those ideas can be contradictory, landing more as open-ended questions than sure-footed assertions of fact. Verhoeven’s story of assault and catharsis is meant to upset you, then asks you to meditate on why you were upset. “Elle” also features the year’s single finest performance, that of Isabelle Huppert.

6) “Moonlight”

One can watch American movies for a lifetime and never see a film like Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight.” It is, at once, a character study, a period piece, a polemic, and a love poem — and in each of those genres, it innovates. Unforgettable, essential viewing.

5) “Sully”

Clint Eastwood’s beliefs are better expressed in his art than in political speeches. “Sully,” which recounts the heroic water landing on the Hudson River by Captain Chesley (played by Tom Hanks in a terrific we-take-this-guy-for-granted performance) Sullenburger, is compulsively watchable. Eastwood doesn’t go for easy answers in his examination of hero worship, celebrity culture, and good ‘ol American know-how. He gives the film a flat, near-storybook ending because sometimes storybook people walk among us.

4) “O.J.: Made in America”

Ah, the year’s finest documentary, which some are disputing is even a proper film. Seven hours is its running time. It’s well earned. Ezra Edelman’s re-examination of the trials, tribulations, and sins of O.J. knows exactly when to deep-dive into the details and when to take some excursions into cultural context and footnotes. Edelman has made the essential documentary on the subject, and perhaps the essential documentary on race in America.

3) “Manchester by the Sea”

With the exception of some overblown music cues, everything “Manchester” does is beautiful. Writer-director Kenneth Lonergan shows us how it’s all done — flashbacks, expository dialogue, setups and payoffs. Lonergan’s characters are forever burdened by a pain or emotional conflict they cannot express. Many times, in the film’s key moments, people literally cannot say what’s on their minds. “Manchester” leaves you with that same feeling — that you can’t quite put into words what you’re feeling, but you know it’s true.

2) “Hail, Caesar!”

Infectious and extremely funny, the Coen Brothers’ latest film casts cinema in religious terms. Their hero, Mannix (Josh Brolin) must make a choice between being a studio fixer and being a corporate man for Lockheed Martin. Good and evil, fun and… not fun. Famous for being cagey, here the brothers say exactly what’s on their minds, complete with highly memorable musical numbers, kidnappers and ransom suitcases, and a dog named Engels. There are scenes here as good as any the brothers have done in any of their prior films. Dare someone to watch the “Laurence Laurentz” scene without doubling over.

1) “Certain Women”

Kelly Reichardt’s “Certain Women” should be viewed once, then immediately viewed a second time. Most of its scenes pass in a way that is so realistic that they seem to be in the room with you rather than up on a screen. There is poetry in every moment. Three somewhat linked stories play out, for the most part, in real time.The bare Montana landscape seems to rhyme with the characters’ quiet loneliness. These women are stressed out, but still ever reaching out. Most viewers have declared the third story, one of unrequited love, the most compelling, but for me the first (in which Laura Dern plays a frazzled small town lawyer) is the best. The film seems to think so as well, since Dern’s character returns later to check in with her problem client (Jared Harris). Lily Gladstone, who plays the lover whose love goes unrequited, drops a performance so poised, so unmolested by self-consciousness and ego, that it’s almost unbelievable.

 

Amanda Knox

The Amanda Knox case is inherently cinematic. Set against the backdrop of a rocky Italian hillside, a twenty-year-old (as the tabloid press would have it) sexually adventurous college girl is accused of murdering her roommate in a drug-induced rage. (Predictably, Lifetime has already taken a crack at it.) Her trial, conviction, and subsequent appellate reversals seem to follow a three-act structure all by themselves.

So why does “Amanda Knox,” the new documentary now streaming on Netflix, feel so ordinary? The filmmakers, Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn, managed to get unprecedented access to the principals, including Knox herself and her then-boyfriend and co-defendant, for talking head interviews. What they do with that access amounts to little more than a primer on the facts of the case rather than a probing character study of Knox or a searching analysis of the facts that coughs up new information.

Knox, who eventually saw her conviction evacuated by the Italian Supreme Court, tells the camera that the answer as to her guilt or innocence isn’t in her eyes but the evidence, or lack thereof. Yet the film lingers on her gaze, inviting the inquiry seemingly without asking her any questions besides “And then what happened?”

For the most part, the filmmakers comb through the case after the fact. But for a sequence near the end in which they capture Knox’s jubilation when she learns of her final acquittal, this is a history lesson. The film’s techniques of impressionistic reenactment inserts and interviewees looking the camera right in the eye recall the work of Errol Morris, and bearing in mind Morris’ film “Tabloid” one wishes Morris himself might have tackled Knox’s story. Blackhurst and McGinn have taken in hand Morris’ style but not his scalpel, his ability to revel in the conflicts in the evidence, the curious pauses and twitches that reside in the spaces between the subjects’ answers. (Andrew Jarecki’s “The Jinx,” which addressed itself to Robert Durst in a Morris-like fashion, should also be mentioned here.)

Although “Amanda Knox” would seem to take the side of its namesake, it mischievously raises points of doubt in order to manufacture ambiguity in the mind of its audience. (As the film chronicles, the investigation was biased and flawed in such a way that a rational person should conclude that Italy’s high court probably made the correct decision.) We see  reasonable questions raised, like “Why did Knox behave so strangely in the aftermath of the death?,” but never hear Knox’s response even though she’s sitting right in front of us. This is the film in microcosm — questions hung almost decoratively in the air, and left there to evaporate.

Amanda Knox — TWO STARS

Directed by Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn. Rated TV-MA. Netflix. 1h 32m.

Gone Girl

“Gone Girl,” the new picture written by novelist Gillian Flynn, is what happens when you nab the dark genius Davis Fincher to direct your Lifetime movie of the week.

The too-smart-for-you plot revolves around married couple Amy (Rosamund Pike) and Nick (Ben Affleck). It’s an all-American Scott Petersen/Laci Petersen-type tale designed to keep the audience guessing. Nick returns home one day to find that Amy has apparently been kidnapped. The investigation and media frenzy that ensues implicates the husband as the prime suspect.

Like “Zodiac,” “Gone Girl” is a mystery that relies on the genius criminal mastermind trope, a trope that lands with more finality in Flynn’s narrative. “Gone Girl,” in Fincher’s hands, is less an essay on marriage than it is a case study on the parallax created by mass media, in which all facts are misleading and the truth is impossible to deduce.

The second wind of Affleck’s career exhales hard in “Gone Girl.” Perfectly cast as a handsome doofus who sometimes uses big words correctly, Affleck is a true movie start here, beautifully portraying the did-he-or-didn’t-he aspect of the plot as a kind of flirtation between himself and the audience. Likewise, Rosamund Pike’s Amy is ever alluring and ever elusive — the more we learn about her, the more faraway she seems.

Supporting performances by Kim Dickens, who plays the investigating police detective, and the brilliant Carrie Coon (check her out on HBO’s “The Leftovers”), who plays Nick’s fraternal twin sister, add a lot of weight to Flynn’s thin characters. But it’s Tyler Perry as hotshot lawyer Tanner Bolt who serves up the film’s most convincing turn.

Fincher’s direction lifts the pulpy elements into the stratosphere through sheer force of will. Meticulous staging constantly hints at the truth that lies just under the suburban sheen. Fincher is a director who refuses to judge, or even evaluate, his characters — a useful trait for this source material.

Whatever thematic ideas viewers wish to yank from the pulpy swamp of Flynn’s screenplay, Fincher is always more interested in how stylish, brooding cinema can depict drama in its purest form — that is, just make sure the audience always wants to know what will happen next. This is his dark genius.

“Gone Girl” — THREE STARS

Directed by David Fincher. Rated R. Twentieth Century Fox. 149 min.