by Glenn Dunks
Lady Gaga can be a great musician, it’s true. But the new documentary about her, Gaga: Five Foot Two, would make anybody unfamiliar with her question why. The film follows a year with the singer as she records her latest album, Joanne (admission: I’m not a fan), and prepares for the big stage of the Super Bowl Halftime Show. Yet something about this film lingers as ever so slightly off.
Part of the problem with Chris Moukarbel’s film is that it’s never quite verite. The camera is never just a fly on the wall to Gaga’s world, but instead a witness to events that lack authenticity...
I suspect that’s the result of a rather amateurish production that wallows in bio-doc clichés both in dramatics and in craft where scene after scene feels set up to be A Moment for a film about Gaga. Whether that be giving life advice while casually cooking in the kitchen dressed in some sort of perplexing tracksuit leotard, giving pre-show pep talks, engaging with a super-fan or as she sits outside her recording studio talking about Madonna*.
What makes all of this particularly aggravating is that the film is positioned as a sort of rebirth of the Gaga brand, the culmination of her Oscar-affiliated re-emergence as a Serious Musician that is just as calculated as any red carpet stunt. Unlike, for instance, Madonna: Truth of Dare – which this film thankfully doesn’t try to replicate – which was all about myth-building and commenting on fame by revelling in what audiences love so much about it, Five Foot Two purports to be about the tearing down of myths.
A glimpse behind the curtain of a woman who’s fed up with the bullshit of the world and wants to be seen not so much as Lady Gaga, but Stefani Germanotta: Serious Musician**.
With her outrageous theatrics now seemingly a thing of the past, her efforts to re-emerge as Serious Gaga often come off as both pompously self-important and somewhat disingenuous. It’s true that the Ridiculous Gaga of yore was often exhausting, but this version is, quite frankly, just a bit of a bore.
And when in the opening minutes there is a throwaway reference to her upcoming role in Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born lands with an eyeroll and a humblebrag, it’s seems quite clear that Five Foot Two and surely Gaga herself are complicit in their own form of myth-making. Because of this disconnect, the documentary simply doesn’t work. It isn’t surprising then the movie is at its best when the artifice is well and truly stripped away, such as in heartbreaking scenes of Gaga suffering from chronic pain courtesy of a broken hip several years ago.
Five Foot Two belatedly attempts to soar towards the end as Gaga prepares for her artistic and creative moment on the world stage at the Super Bowl halftime show performance. Frustratingly, we don’t actually get to see the final results (rights issues, I am sure), which in effect lessens the impact of the film’s dramatic crescendo. What a triumph it would have been to see her suffer through her pain only to come out the other side victorious. This when coupled with only fleeting sequences of her recording Joanne in studio, and it strikes as a disappointing missed opportunity. She might not agree, but the world needs the vibrancy and the electricity of her performance. That this film all but skips over this part of her legacy means that Five Foot Two comes off as less of a triumph, but instead a dimming of her career to a faint glow and a film unworthy of its talented subject.
* Remember when Madonna could make multiple concert documentaries and not mention another popstar once because she was the only one that mattered. Gaga mentions Madonna before the ten-minute mark! Make of that what you will.
** She will be credited as Stefani Germanotta in A Star is Born, I film I still do not believe isn’t just an elaborate hoax born out of a Saturday Night Live writers’ room celebrity madlibs session.
Release: Streaming everywhere now on Netflix.
Oscar Chance: The Sound of Music and "Til it Happens to You" will almost certainly not climax in a doc nomination. This is not the sort of celebrity bio-doc that the branch goes for. Netflix have far bigger fish to fry in this race.