Please be advised: the following article discusses in-depth details for “A Star is Born” and its ending.
As “A Star is Born” begins its ascent to being one of the most talked-about films of the fall, one moment that’s likely to stick with audiences more than anything is the way star/co-writer/director Bradley Cooper chooses to cap his debut.
Like all romantic tragedies, “A Star is Born” concludes in part on a sad note, as folk-country star Jackson Maine (Cooper) ends his film-long battle with drug and alcohol addiction by hanging himself in his garage as his wife Ally (Stefani Germanotta, a.k.a. Lady Gaga) performs at a concert.
At the Nashville stop on his pre-release screening tour in September, Cooper advised that audiences are first to decide why the film needed to end the way it did, but he gave his own reasoning for Maine’s fate.
In the third act, Maine embarrasses Ally at the Grammys on-stage while in a drugged and drunken stupor and enters rehab to clean himself up. To Cooper, it might’ve not been as ironclad a decision for Maine as one would hope.
“For me, you know, I think he may have gotten sober for reasons that may not stick,” Cooper said. “[In the rehab facility], [Ally] says, ‘are you going to come home,’ and [Maine] says, ‘What are you talking about? I’m in here for you,’ and it’s like, ‘uh oh.’ That’s the first red flag.”
He talked about how Maine’s tragic ending was hinted at in the beginning. “The truth is, when we meet him, he’s close to the edge anyway, and he just never had a support group his whole life,” he explained.
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“He’s 13; he’s endlessly 13 when his father died, and his brother came back, and then all of a sudden, he started writing songs…he became famous at, like, 18, so he didn’t have to cultivate the rest of his life, but now he’s 43-years-old, and he’s like a prizefighter, and so I wanted to do something physical…I wanted that feel of that punch-drunk boxer almost, athlete, that your body is going to start to wear.”
Cooper also cited his personal connection to addiction and personal loss of friends through it as a reason to thread such a devastating conclusion into the film’s narrative.
He said he wanted anyone who has gone through the world of addiction to believe what’s on screen. “There’s no way it wasn’t going to end like that,” Cooper said. Though, the director feels that his film’s conclusion doesn’t come with just sorrow.
“I don’t see it as a sad ending, necessarily, because when [Ally] looks at you at the end of the movie, into the camera, that, to me, is the moment that the star is born,” Cooper said. “She’s planted, and she’s ready now to face all of the hardship. All of the love that she’s gone through, she’s going to take that into her heart, into her life for the rest of her life.”
“A Star is Born” plays in theaters across the country now.