Last week Chris Feil looked back at Judy Garland and A Star is Born's musical beginning. This week, it's Streisand/Kristofferson...
Some viewers have chastised the current remake of A Star is Born’s presentation of pop music, but it kind of pales to the cynicism and condescension to 70s rock and roll in the Streisand/Kristofferson version of 1976. What had previous been told as a saga of the film industry is transplanted into rock arenas, the emptiness of fame represented by a ravenous crowd of thousands acting a fool. Know a little something about Streisand’s skittishness with (sometimes rabid) crowds and you can begin to understand the film’s boorish presentation of fandom, so some grace can be granted. But nevertheless, fame suddenly seems all the more vacuous here in the face of Real Artistry.
Or maybe this is just exacerbated because the music Kris Kristofferson’s mumblerocker John Norman Howard kind of blows. Okay, let’s be real: he sucks. He’s crafted in the mold of the era, all shaggy vibes and southern groove, like a Jim Morrison without the psychotropics or a one-man CCR minus the icky Americana. What’s missing in his presence is music that could conceivably fill an arena; instead, we’re given junk. Alcohol antics and crap music quickly establish some narrative mileage to show him on a steep decline, but we’re left wondering how he got to the top in the first place. It's a ghastly portrait, and all we really see of this genre.
Enter the decidedly-not-rock-and-roll Barbra Streisand to save the musical day. And though she flirts with more rhythm and blues (fronting a group called The Oreos: YIKES), her presence brings a musicality that, while welcome, makes you question the film’s perception on wilder world of brasher musical genres. The crowd that once behaved beastly with vocalized resentment goes silent once she bestows them with her adult-contempo sound. Her Esther is here to civilize the masses, at best a Carole King to Kristofferson’s watered-down Alice Cooper.
Whereas Kristofferson is stooped in nonsense theatrics (“Are you a figment of my imagination or am I one of yours?” Sir, what??), all it takes for Esther to captivate us is her voice and the fuschia orb of her perm. The qualitative distance between the two of them is the film stacking its own deck, the visual reverence for Streisand allowing us to get lost in its feeling in ways that Kristofferson’s sequences can’t among the freneticism (and junk songs). But the distinction between the two styles of music can be forgiven its reductive bluntness here, because basking in the glory of a once-in-a-generation female superstar is an integral ingredient to the legacy of A Star is Born. And you simply can’t claim that Streisand doesn’t deliver on that.
This A Star is Born is the one that wants most to just revel in its star power rather than focus on the opposite-trajectory love story, and it is at its admissible best when it does just that. And Streisand’s charms and silky vocals are indeed soft as the easy chair she coos about, the reason we showed up in the first place. Though this one is the weakest of the films because of that discordant, unbalanced musicality, it still saves itself (at least in part) by giving us something as evergreen as “Evergreen”. But a star isn't so much born here, it's bolstered.
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