Maestro (2023)
dir. Bradley Cooper
Rated: R
image: ©2023 Netflix
I’m not sure if the title of the new film from Bradley Cooper, Maestro, is supposed to refer to the movie’s subject, legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, or to Cooper himself. Because make no mistake, Bradley Cooper is the definitive maestro in control here, and he wants you to know it; as with A Star is Born, Cooper’s debut behind the camera, the actor-turned-director is pulling double duty as both director and star. The results this time around are a decidedly more mixed bag.
Technically, Maestro is a superb film. With the help of master cinematographer Matthew Libatique, Cooper’s film is undeniably gorgeous. We see the tumultuous life of Bernstein – and the volatile relationship between the biopic’s Great Man and his wife, the Costa Rican-American actress Felicia Montealegre Bernstein – over the course of five decades.
Cooper and Libatique bring each of these eras to vibrant life on screen. The pair guide us through Bernstein’s ups and downs using color for the composer’s later years (the 1960s through the ‘80s) and black-and-white, during the ‘40s and ‘50s, to show the composer as a young man. Libatique also uses varying aspect ratios to denote the passage of time. The early years are shot in the boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, close to the standard for Hollywood movies of the time being depicted, and he transitions to a 1.85:1 widescreen frame for the color sequences.
Where Maestro falters is in the performance of the lead. In a former life, I listened to a local sports-talk radio station. One of the producers for the station had a bit where he would go to sports press conferences and ask questions as the character Scoops Callahan, or as he was more affectionately known by listeners, “1920s reporter guy.” (His signature was to begin each question with, “Champ! Champ!”) Cooper’s Bernstein is essentially a more serious version of Scoops. The immeasurably talented actor made the Capital “C” Choice to play Bernstein like he’s perpetually a 1940s radio announcer.
(If you need one more example of how over the top Cooper is in the role, throughout my screening of Maestro, I kept thinking of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s satirical take on 1940s journalists in The Hudsucker Proxy.)
That’s not to suggest the real-life Bernstein sounded nothing like Cooper’s simulacrum. When talking about the movie, my wife’s mother noted how much the actor sounded like the real man.
(That observation also struck me as to how famous and prevalent Bernstein was in his day. My mother-in-law grew up during the period when the world-famous conductor partnered with the New York Philharmonic to bring the latter’s Young People's Concerts series to television. He hosted over fifty episodes, which aired between 1958 and 1972 on CBS. He not only conducted the music, but also acted as a teacher and explicator of classical music for the audience.)
Cooper might have gotten the cadence of Bernstein’s on-screen persona right, but the miscalculation comes in making the decision to go full blast for the entire 129 minutes of the picture. If he had only decided to moderate a little, my reaction to the performance might have been very different.
Maestro begins with Bernstein’s origin story. In 1943, we meet Leonard Bernstein – Lenny to his friends – as he is given his big break with the New York Philharmonic at the incredibly young age of twenty-five. The orchestra’s guest conductor has fallen ill, and Lenny, who is serving as assistant conductor, is temporarily promoted to the high-profile gig, making his conducting debut to rapturous praise.
Lenny is a gay man, an open secret among the more accepting music scene in New York City. He has an on-again-off-again relationship with clarinetist David Oppenheim. (The magnetic Matt Bomer is practically wasted in the tiny Oppenheim role. I will celebrate the day when Bomer is given a leading movie role that matches the exceptional roles he’s embodied for television; see the 2023 Showtime miniseries Fellow Travelers for proof.)
Things change when Lenny meets Felicia Montealegre at a party. It’s never stated explicitly, but the young artist seems to be making a calculated move in pairing up with Felicia. He’s been hailed as an emerging talent, one person even telling him that he could be the first great American symphony conductor. Of course, the person who tells him this, a Jewish man who experienced the German mid-century brand of antisemitism first hand, suggests that if he really wants to attain greatness, he should probably opt for a less Jewish sounding name. Perhaps he should become Leonard Burns, if he wants to be accepted by mainstream America.
That’s obviously not the only thing Lenny will need to change about himself in his pursuit of excellence. He opts to keep his last name intact – in a lovely private moment shared between the two lovers, Felicia scoffs at the idea of a name change; Felicia Montealegre Burns would sound ridiculous, she comically muses – but he leaves Oppenheim behind for a traditional marriage and three kids.
This dichotomy in who Bernstein was in public and in private forms the crux of the conflict in Maestro. At one point, Lenny and Felicia are interviewed live by journalist Edward R. Murrow on his iconic TV show Person to Person. (Libatique uses some sort of ghosting effect during this sequence to recreate what television of the 1950s looked like, to excellent effect.) Lenny talks about the differences between a performer and an artist, a subject he can speak about authoritatively, as he is both.
His larger-than-life public persona, which involves outsized emotive expression during his conducting – Cooper soars during the sequences in which we see Lenny on stage, doing his thing – conflicts with his more quiet, contemplative artistic side. Living this double life, Lenny jokes to Murrow, will inevitably lead to schizophrenia, an observation that loses its humor as we see the toll that hiding his true self takes on the man over the course of the film.
I kicked Cooper in the teeth a little bit at the top of the review, but one moment late in the film highlights the actor’s astonishing talent at understated moments. Lenny’s teenaged daughter has heard rumors about her father and they are so troubling, she asks her mother if they are true. Felicia tells her husband that she needs to talk their daughter, but admonishes him not to tell the truth.
In a crushing moment, Lenny lies to his daughter’s face, telling her the rumors she’s heard are the result of petty jealousy, something he’s been dealing with his entire life because of his extraordinary talent. The look on Cooper’s face as he tells this lie is devastating. He manages to hit three or four emotions at once – grief, shame, panic – that he delivers in between the words he’s speaking. He does most of it with his eyes, and it’s quietly heartbreaking.
Maestro spends a significant amount of time conveying its subject’s artistic greatness. Here was a man who not only conducted the great works of other luminaries – the late sequence in which we see Lenny conduct Mahler's Resurrection Symphony at England’s Ely Cathedral is a wonder – he also wrote his own.
He wrote the score for Elia Kazan’s Best Picture winner On the Waterfront. He composed the music for the worldwide sensation West Side Story. (At one point, we hear a portion of “Prologue” from West Side Story, and it sounds as fresh and avant-garde today as it must have upon its 1957 debut.)
Indeed, Maestro is filled with the music of Leonard Bernstein, and each time one of his works is featured, Cooper’s film is lifted into the sublime. The dizzying highs of Bernstein’s music are matched by the crushing lows of his tumultuous marriage and life-long partnership with Felicia. During the scene in which Felicia tells Lenny that he must talk to their daughter, she reminds him that their child, “didn’t ask for any of this.” Felicia might as well have been talking about herself, a result of the indignities she had to endure due to her husband’s serial philandering and substance abuse.
As Felicia, Carey Mulligan delivers a crushing portrayal of a woman who makes the best of her hard situation. Mulligan is an odd choice to play a character whose heritage is half-Costa Rican. Her Mid-Atlantic accent boarders on parody, but is ultimately overshadowed by her costar’s even more extreme diction choices.
On the subject of odd casting choices, Cooper was involved in a bit of controversy for using a noticeable prosthetic nose to portray Bernstein. Accusations of “Jewface” were lobbed at the actor. No less than the Jewish NGO Anti-Defamation League came to Cooper’s defense, adding much needed nuance in our age of nuance-free discourse. The hook-nosed Jewish caricature of vile antisemitic propaganda has been used for centuries in order to “other” Jewish people as monsters. As a historical biopic honoring one of the great Jewish artists of the last century, what Cooper was doing in Maestro, according to the ADL, was certainly not that. I tend to agree.
In the opening sequence of the movie, when Lenny gets the call that will forever change his life, Cooper’s camera follows Lenny from his apartment to the concert hall via a sweeping camera move. It takes us seamlessly from the apartment, to the theatre balcony, and sweeps over the seats of the hall before resting (very briefly) on the proscenium. It’s a thrilling introduction, but it was obviously assembled using CGI trickery, and the movie magic suffers as a result.
It also feels overly rehearsed, like Cooper’s accent. After seeing Maestro, I joked with a friend that Cooper got a bad case of Oscars fever in the wake of his first directing effort garnering an Oscar Best Picture nod.
At the risk of being too reductive, Maestro feels like the movie that Cooper made in order to climb Oscars Mountain again, hopefully this time returning with the little gold statue that eluded him on the first try. He got the nod, but he was lead slightly astray in the effort. Still, Maestro is a touching film exploring an extraordinary relationship of love and betrayal.
Why it got 3 stars:
Maestro falls into two biopic traps, an overly broad imitation of its subject, in the performance of Bradley Cooper, and trying to fit an entire human life into the length of a feature film, causing much of what’s under the microscope to be flattened. Still, it’s a powerful movie about a conflicted and troubled genius.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- I wrote in the main review about Cooper embodying the exuberance of Bernstein while conducting. One of these sequences in particular stood out to me, for a very personal reason. I was a singer in high school and part of college, and I successfully auditioned in my senior year of high school — after failing to make the cut the previous three years — for a spot in the 1998 Texas Music Educators Association All-State choir.
One of the pieces required for the audition, and later performed at the TMEA All-State choir concert, was featured in Maestro. It’s the finale to the operetta Candide, for which Bernstein composed the music, called “Make Our Garden Grow.”
Late in the film, Lenny is conducting a choir in a rehearsal of the song. The sheer joy on Cooper’s face, as Bernstein, in this sequence is transformative. I spent many, many hours rehearsing this song in the lead up to the audition — and countless additional hours rehearsing it in preparation for the performance with my fellow All-State Choir members — just ask my brother, who had to endure my practice sessions on the other side of our shared bedroom wall. The instant that “Make Our Garden Grow” turned up in Maestro, I began singing my part in my head. After over a quarter-of-a-century later, it was still in my noggin, ready for me to begin rehearsing again.
I wasn't a very curious person in high school, plus, there wasn’t much of an internet in those days, so I never took the time to research the work in which “Make Our Garden Grow” is a part. At the time, I never fully understood the meaning of the song. (Spoiler, the “garden” in the song is a metaphor for life itself.) Still, the words of the song alone moved me.
Knowing what the song is about, understanding more about the man who created it, and seeing Cooper’s interpretation of Bernstein’s complete transformation and transcendence upon bringing it to life made me fall in love with artistic achievement all over again.
Art lifts us up out of the muck of regular human existence. I grew as a human being through those countless hours of rehearsing. That should be the true goal of an education, and countless people, from my choir directors through to composers like Bernstein himself helped me become a better person through art.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Maestro is currently available in wide theatrical release and via a Netflix subscription, which is how I screened it.
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The FFC’s political soapbox
I need a pick-me-up after the week I’ve had. So, instead of doom and gloom, I’m highlighting an atheist podcast I listen to that released an uplifting episode a few weeks ago. If you need something inspirational, check it out. And, for any believers out there, please remember that, in the history of the human species, humankind has worshipped somewhere close to 18,000 different deities. When you understand why you don’t believe in any of them except one, you’ll understand why I don’t believe in yours.