Maestro (2023)
Musical giant Leonard Bernstein -- up close (unavoidably) and personal (intensely)
Bradley Cooper’s deeply seasoned Bernstein, with his passion for music still driving him
Maestro (2023)
Streaming on Netflix
By now our idea of a bio-pic has stretched like an accordion. Two recent examples show us how divergent that catchall word has become.
We used it for Elvis (2022), about a rock ’n’ roller’s poor, rural childhood, followed by his ascent to superstardom, ending in his drug-addled, rhinestone demise. Clear storyline: steady rise, peak success, sad dissolution.
By contrast, Oppenheimer (2023) showed us a lifetime shaken up. A gifted nuclear physicist helps end a world war by shepherding the building of an unprecedented weapon of mass destruction. This “national hero” is later humiliated as a subversive traitor. His torment is splintered back and forth in time, variously in black and white or color. No tidy storyline. Ambiguous resolution.
With Maestro, Bradley Cooper, as star, director and co-screenwriter with Josh Singer, has blended these approaches. The movie starts with a jaunty, headlong immersion into the early professional life of musical prodigy Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990).
In a glistening, nostalgic black and white, everything is bright and bristling, like a cheery ’40s musical comedy.
Yet the picture is shot with a contemporary, skeptical sleekness. It’s announcing, nay, heralding: here we have a talented go-getter on the make. Is he all he claims to be?
At first, it sure looks so. We see the enfant terrible Bernstein at age 25 thrust into worldwide classical music celebrity with a stroke of luck.
On November 14, 1943, the guest conductor slated to lead a New York Philharmonic concert at Carnegie Hall fell ill. Bernstein was hastily summoned to conduct the entire program without rehearsal. The audience and critics in attendance were bowled over.
Boldly, Cooper as director gives this crucial turning point in Bernstein’s career the feel of a lark. The camera finds the prodigy in bed – as it happens with clarinetist David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer), a friend and sometime lover – in an upper apartment at Carnegie.
Once he’s awakened by the phone call informing him to get ready to conduct without any rehearsal time, the camera follows him as he leaps from bed and races downward through the auditorium’s balcony. The camera gets ahead of him, zooming in on the podium where he’ll conduct. The Big Moment has come.
Before we quite take it all in, he’s onstage in a live national radio broadcast leading the orchestra before a packed house. At the concert’s end, after thunderous applause, Bernstein accepts plaudits from the music professionals who’ve joined him on stage.
The next day the triumph is on the front page of The New York Times (the paper also editorializes about it) and the story is picked up around the world. The youthful master has pulled off his first, galvanizing coup.
This is like many of the movie’s swift scenes, antic or serious, that swirl through the crescendos in Berstein’s lifelong obsession with music, both classical and commercial, as conductor and composer.
We get artfully, almost artificially, staged glimpses of his flair as pianist and conductor, bits from the Broadway scores he wrote for On the Town and West Side Story, and a thick brooding chunk of his solemn contemplative work Mass.
Naturally this makes for an impressive catalog of Bernstein’s gilded, multi-faceted career. But it’s also a plunge into the mind of the man racing to stay in charge of his musical gifts, which he always did, while confronting the personal demons that nearly ripped him apart.
The hopeful young Lenny and Felicia (Carey Mulligan) beginning to fall in love
Their insidious, sometimes ugly force could rock Lenny’s nearly constant steadiness and composure.
Brilliantly, the script links its focus on Bernstein to an intimate portrait of his closest confidante and emotional partner, the beautiful, talented Chilean actress and painter Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan).
They married in their late 20s, and Felicia knew of Lenny’s bisexuality from the beginning. In Mulligan’s deft portrayal, we come to understand that, as deeply as the two loved each other, she couldn’t contain her rage at the self-indulgent Bernstein, whose appetites for music, people, food and sex were insatiable.
Yet in fairness to Bernstein, Felicia is revealed here as a co-dependent. They both exulted in the lavish, crowded parties they threw in their New York apartment and at their Connecticut estate. Cooper’s darting camera makes clear that this incessant buzz of friends, collaborators and hangers-on is slowly eroding their commitment to each other.
Here’s precisely where the movie triumphs. For the non-judgmental brio he brings to the subject of artistic power and disillusion, Cooper, as director and star, deserves both praise and appreciation.
Cooper, the actor turned director here seems to be driven by prowling appetites of his own. He’s tempered them to open up the heart of a human and musical dynamo who wrote his own rules yet couldn’t always keep to them.
The actor’s work gets at what I think of as the essence of a creative soul, whose fiercest flames and trickiest self-deceptions war deep within.
After watching this movie, I suspected that Cooper and Bernstein, both rabid sensualists, would have gotten along just fine with one another.
He makes the Bernsteins’ lives look and feel ravishing, from the charm of the backward-looking black and white cinematography in the picture’s first third to the crisp, enriched, lingeringly sad color palette of the rest.
Lenny and Felicia lived high, so dizzyingly that their marriage nearly collapsed, yet when Felicia develops terminal cancer Lenny remains staunchly by her side. And she bestows on him a kind of forgiveness when she suddenly appears at a 1973 concert he conducts at England’s Ely cathedral to give him her blessing.
This gorgeous, titanic 1973 concert, featuring Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, is filmed mostly in dramatic long shots, with a full orchestra and dozens of singers, and is recreated onscreen at the actual site. Cooper hypnotically conducts in the high, sweaty, rhapsodic Bernstein style.
Bernstein conducting Mahler in full grandeur at the celebrated Ely Cathedral concert
Here and throughout the movie, the cinematography by Matthew Libatique expertly deploys its color schemes, whether in creamy black and white or multihued city and suburban luxury, to make the spaces feel both heedlessly and rapturously lived in.
Kevin Thompson’s production design is deliciously detailed, from the slightly worn chic of the Bernsteins’ cavernous Manhattan apartment to their too-too “decorated” rustic Connecticut manse to a raucous bacchanal where Lenny carefully balances a tray as he thoughtfully offers guests lines of cocaine.
Cooper ages as Bernstein in skillfully applied makeup, while Mulligan’s Felicia shows her age in subtly layered makeup as her youthful glow begins to show faint wrinkles and her face is finally ravaged with the pale pallor of fatal illness.
All of this fine technical work, pleasurable as it is to see, remains completely at the service of the life breathed into the two lead performances.
Cooper slowly deepens and darkens Bernstein’s signature voice, from the sly, slippery flippancy of the gifted young artist through the sober, self-important sonority of the seasoned professional to the throaty near-croak of the ravaged, yet still vibrant, musical shaman.
The actor’s work gets at what I think of as the essence of a creative soul, whose fiercest flames and trickiest self-deceptions war deep within.
Mulligan makes Felicia a painfully sincere, yet far from naive, marital partner who eventually finds she can’t live with Bernstein’s ceaseless churning of lies, pretending to be the loyal husband and father while conducting strings of affairs with men and trying, and failing, to conceal his deception from the world.
His life came to be one long lie about a lie, as Felicia finally sees it. Yet she tolerated the deception.
When their teenaged daughter Jamie (Maya Hawke) tells Felicia of rumors she’s heard about her father’s sexuality, Felicia commands Lenny to talk to her but adds, “Don't you dare tell her the truth”. What exactly, then, was Lenny to do?
The movie’s most heartbreaking scene, and I think Cooper’s finest moment, comes when his eyes rest on Jamie after she asks if the rumors are true and he replies, “No darling, absolutely not true.”
The camera stays on Cooper’s face, and we see in his eyes that Bernstein has just told his daughter a gutless, total lie, an act he’ll never be able to undo.
So much of the movie has this laden sense of fate haunting these two attractive, vibrant, well-intentioned people who actually wanted to give the world more than they took from it.
But neither was quite strong enough to bear the weight of extravagant talent and charm pitted against profligacy and deception. Bernstein’s gifts and Felicia’s fealty surely balanced out in the long run. But at what cost?
Cooper, the actor turned director here seems to be driven by prowling appetites of his own. He’s tempered them to open up the heart of a human and musical dynamo who wrote his own rules yet couldn’t always keep to them.
After watching this movie, I suspected that Cooper and Bernstein, both rabid sensualists, would have gotten along just fine with one another.
Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg considered directing this movie, but both eventually embraced the idea of Cooper at the helm.
Good call. Here we’ve gotten exactly the right person for the job: Bradley Cooper, sage of anxiety.