BRADLEY COOPER: MAESTRO (2023) - NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
CAREY MULLIGAN AND BRADLEY COOPER in MAESTRO The greatness, gay dalliances, and loving but fraught marriage of Leonard Bernstein in Cooper's classy followup to 'A Star Is Born'Bradley Cooper's
Maestro is a glitteringly elegant, precise portrait of the multitalented director, composer, and educator, with world-class, Oscar-worthy prosthetics and makeup. If there's hubris in the actor's directing himself as such a great American cultural figure, he nonetheless carries it off with panache.But in a sense the movie's not about him. It's about Felicia Montaleagre, Bernstein's elegant Chilean actress wife, and Carey Mulligan's brilliant performance in the role, elegant, tasteful, never mannered as she sometimes has been. This is a film with the limitations of its biopic elements, but it transcends that genre, and is very fine work, justifying the promise of Cooper's
A Star Is Born remake directorial debut, justifying his alleged anointment by Marty or Spielberg to take on this project, for which they've given their producer blessing, their judgement proven right here.
This is the portrait of a marriage, a marriage at the heart of American and New York culture (if they can be said to coincide) lasting from 1951 to Felicia's early death of cancer in 1978. The burden of this marriage is obvious. It is not only a fame and performing life for Lennie that overshadowed Felicia's being and accomplishments, but his dalliances with men. The film achieves a weariness and excitement that linger in the mind (perhaps also in the heart). There is glorious energy, thrusting, confident mise-en-scène to match the bold simulacrum of makeup and voice and the recreation of boisterous joie-de-vivre of Leonard Bernstein that Cooper achieves.
Sometimes it feels like the picture is shying away from the main burden of its subject that clouded the marriage, as timid and closeted about gayness as the forties and fifties when the story begins. Yet this is not fair or true, because the complexity is there, and one winds up making excuses and learning to understand the repressiveness of a period and why this film is true to it. Owen Gleiberman's admiring
Variety review is a good post-viewing place to begin in understanding
Maestro. Gleiberman provides both a thorough description and a magnificent apology. He makes us understand how well all the things Leonard Bernstein, as "the first American conductor on a level with European legends like Arturo Toscanini," operated on so many levels, and his wild exuberance - expressed by the natural glow and sparkle of Bradley Cooper's eyes, no prosthetics needed for that - was part of a breaking of barriers that took him, with his oversize personality, beyond great musical gifts to superstardom. The film is too sophisticated to bother showing it, but Lennie became as much a household word as Albert Einstein. If
Maestro works as it's well-programmed to do, it will provide hints to virgin youthful viewers of why this man remains an icon.
The movie begins in color, then goes to black and white (such binary visuals being the useful cliché of our moment now), also framing in intimate square ratio. The opening is a melancholy strain on solo piano, Bernstein's own composition like most of the film, heard before we see Lennie as a low-lit figure bent over the keyboard, it's after Felicia's death, it's a filmed interview, and he's saying how much he misses her, and his head bows down in silence after the playing. It's a great, unexpected way to begin . It declares this is not a biopic but the portrait of a marriage. But next we go to a virtuoso black and white sequence when Lennie, who hasn't met Felicia, is in his bedroom with his dreamboat lover David (Matthew Bomer), and runs through the apartment and right into Carnegie Hall. Age 25, he has gotten the big break, called in as an assistant conductor to replace maestro Bruno Walter who's taken sick, and he makes a brilliant debut, with no practice, and gets immediate recognition.
From this we go not to "West Side Story," but "a backstage riff on 'Fancy Free,' the 1944 ballet created by Bernstein and Jerome Robbins." Gleiberman points out how Cooper's screenplay written with Josh Singer (who seems to have cut his teeth on "The West Wing") continually avoids the obvious bio beats while still painting a rich, complete portrait, hardly even showing Lennie conducting until a grand, full-bore scene of Mahler in a cathedral after Felicia is dead showing how absolutely go-for-broke and magnificent Bernstein still was in his late years, the big mane of hair still shaking turned to gray, one hand still perpetually holding a lit cigarette, even when conducing a rehearsal. (This is painful to watch, but true.)
My enthusiasm is influenced by lifelong admiration of the man, not so much as a great conductor, though technically he was one, departing from the stick-figure metronome and showing how leading a symphony orchestra could be balletic and inventive, but as a great musical personality, communicating his enthusiasm and making things like his difference with Glenn Gould over the tempo of a Brahms concerto a matter of humorous but insistent controversy. The man was a force of nature, and made for great television. He communicated to all ages and persuasions. He was a public
art intellectual, if there can be such a thing, in contrast to the testy political kind.
It was also an influence to see this film in what may have been the most eagerly and fully attended press screening of the New York Film Festival so far, with the audience, for a change, as pin-drop silent as attendees of a Paris cinema or theater would be. This is not a gushy crowd; it provides no ovations. But attention was paid. And this benefitted the tense moments like the big Thanksgiving argument, when Lennie has gotten sloppy, cruising his next young man openly at a party, and Snoopy both inside and outside in the parade signal the outsize egos and tragicomic mess this fraught marriage - not just of convenience, but of persistent love - has become. This, and so much more, are contained in this artful and sophisticated film.
One of the year's best American movies and a must-see.
Maestro, 129 mins., debuted at Venice, also showing at New York, Zurich, also at the New York Film Festival where it was screened for this review. Shown in the NYFF Oct. 2, 13, shown at both Walter Reade Theater and in the David Geffen concert hall, current home of the New York Philharmonic of which Bernstein was the director from 1958 to 1969. It was produced by Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Cooper, among others, it is destined for multi-nation internet release by Netflix (Dec. 20).
Metacritic rating: 80%.
A late interview with
Leonard Bernstein.
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