Art Within Art

Why great on-screen artists are so hard to come by

Lady Gaga is back in the limelight this year. She recently released a ballad with Bruno Mars that seems destined to take over karaoke machines and wedding playlists, and later this year she’ll star opposite Joaquin Phoenix in Joker: Folie a Deux. I like Gaga and I think the song is lovely, but I can’t say I’m all that invested in the movie musical redux of the self-serious Joker franchise. The musical format, however, got me thinking of her previous run at a musical movie, itself karaoke fodder: A Star Is Born. I loved that movie a lot more than I expected to, in no small part because of her and Bradley Cooper’s vocal performances. But then and now, I found my enjoyment to be in spite of what felt like half-written songs, including the breakout “Shallow”.

That isn’t to say “Shallow” isn’t nice to listen to, or that it doesn’t fit the moment or the character. I’m not a realism-in-movies stickler at all; otherwise I would probably balk at the whole situation, wherein Gaga’s Ally seizes the surprise opportunity given to her by rock star Jackson Maine to belt out a song she wrote with him the night before in a parking lot to an audience of thousands. The moment works because of the way the characters are written up until that point and because it really does show off Ally’s vocal chops. But it sort of feels…half done? Kind of like it was rattled off late at night in a parking lot and then not fully written out? The melody is nice, but verses are very basic, back and forth with lyrics vaguely longing for change. Then they launch into the powerhouse part way too quickly, singing what seems to be a bridge as though it were a chorus, repeating “in the sha-ha-shallow” too many times, before ending very abruptly.

I’m not a musician or music critic, so maybe I’m not qualified to speak on this — maybe it’s meant to feel off the cuff (though it’s certainly presented as a finished product, never revised after that initial performance). Nevertheless, I found myself thinking of it as I listened to the aforementioned “Die With a Smile”, which is a ballad that feels far more complete, is written to complement both singers, and communicates powerful feeling through its lyrics. In contrast, Shallow feels like one of those TikTok songs that pops off because of a single verse or chorus and then underwhelms after months of that artist going “should I release the whole thing??”

I don’t mean to pick on A Star Is Born, one of my favorite movies of 2018. It happens all the time in movies and TV, both good and bad: characters presented as exceptional artists can’t seem to produce exceptional art. Spike Jonze’s Her presents the writer Theodore, who works for a greeting card company that writes highly personalized cards. He’s a thoughtful, sensitive character whose personal conversations are beautiful, but his writing is overly flowery with customer specifics sprinkled in. It’s fine but hardly the type of thing to bring one to tears, as it supposedly does a book publisher character in the film. Other times, as in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, a character’s genius is frequently referred to but never demonstrated. Marriage Story takes this a step further, with characters frequently taking the time to mention that the character Charlie is the recipient of the MacArthur GENIUS Grant. GENIUS, folks, please do not forget this guy is a GENIUS writer (who hilariously is meant to be a stand-in for director Noah Baumbach in this re-telling of his own divorce), but please do not ask to see any of his writing.

But what about biopics, which are frequently about artists with an oeuvre we can already point to as great? That’s not a guarantee either, as many such films will reduce the artist to inevitably great figures and decline to complicate that picture at all with any critical examination of their work. From artist-approved hokum like Bohemian Rhapsody to more technically well-made stuff like Straight Outta Compton (a film I quite enjoy as a hip-hop fan but admit falters in its second half), there’s not much insight into what makes the art itself special, rather a broad gesture toward things you already know. Most often these films are interested in the question “Isn’t it crazy that people didn’t see what was good about this from the start?”, and occasionally implying that the artists understood in real time the exact impact their work would have on the world.

The best on-screen artists, I’ve found, are characters found in films like Whiplash, Inside Llewyn Davis, or All That Jazz, films that start from a place of wanting to say something about the character and are only somewhat concerned with authenticity. It so happens that their work is pleasant to watch and listen to, but what really gives it life is the desire to chase what they want and what the chase does to them. Whiplash’s Neiman and Fletcher are obsessed with perfection and do battle with each other through their music in order to achieve it. Llewyn Davis is in a rut after the death of his musical partner, but refuses to come to terms with his own limitations as an artist. All That Jazz’s Joe, a talented playwright, faces the blurry feeling that creativity can create, an uncertainty that your work (which you can’t look at objectively) is even good. All of these leads are loosely based on or inspired by real artists, but the films care most about showing you how their art makes the characters themselves feel.

Occasionally too you’ll see a song adapted from a book that translates excellently. The first Hobbit film does this well with the dwarves’ somber shanty about their lost home, as does Cloud Atlas with its Cloud Atlas Sextet, a doomed composer’s opus which echoes through time and other characters’ stories. Here you have written direction for how these things make the characters — and by extension, the audience — feel. Talented composers pull these out of plain words on the page, but they have to understand where they’re meant to go with it.

To get back to A Star Is Born, the best stuff in there is music that feels like it’s sung from Ally to Jackson or vice versa. The first and last songs she sings for him and the wonderful Music to My Eyes, where they sing to each other, evoke the deep feelings they have for one another in a way Shallow really can’t. They’re great because Ally and Jackson are experiencing profound and wonderful love. The moments where they share that feeling with the audience (both on-screen and off) are the real art.