Bradley Cooper has followed on from the success of his directorial debut, 2018’s A Star is Born, with Maestro, a biographical drama about the American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, charting his rise to acclaim and documenting the strained yet beautiful relationship he had with his wife, Felicia Montealegre.
The film opens with an aged Bernstein sitting at the piano, telling of how much he misses his recently deceased wife, before flashing back into black-and-white to find him in his mid-20s, moments before giving his first conducting performance that would lead him to become one of the greatest American musicians of all time.
The fact that we are thrown immediately into the professionalism and undoubted talent that Bernstein possessed, rather than have him make his first strokes with a stick or first notes at a piano, is indicative of the fact that he had little time nor want to explore who he might be as a person with a difficult upbringing. Instead, music is Bernstein’s entire life and existence and is one of the only times where he really seems to have vitality, barring flirting either with his wife or handsome young men behind her back.
Except for a few extremely rare moments of intimate confession between Bernstein and Felicia, the lack of understanding about what the musician is hiding underneath his dedication to music makes it hard to feel sympathy for him. As Felicia claims, Bernstein uses music as “anger” rather than find any peace within it, and it’s difficult to say whether the film is better for eschewing diving headfirst into Bernstein’s undoubted trauma despite his undoubted talent.
What’s more evident is that by largely ignoring Bernstein’s past, whatever it may have been comprised of (all we learn is that his father was cruel and that Bernstein himself developed an earnest homosexuality), we too only focus on the music, the grandest pieces of which arrive some two thirds into the film. The result is that it can be easy to dismiss Bernstein as a sympathetic figure and perceive him and Felicia as talented, fortunate and affluent persons with incredibly first-world problems.
As is often the case with Netflix productions, one can get the sense that things are slightly over-produced, even if the film’s first half (shot entirely in black-and-white) does its best to retain an air of authenticity. However, there’s a sense of the film trying too hard and no matter how grainy the image gets, one can almost always see through the smoke and mirrors.
And smoke there is an awful lot of as there is not a single scene in which Bernstein is not smoking a cigarette other than those where he is conducting, though perhaps his stick replaces his smoke in those instances, proving that the musician had something rousing away inside of him that he was always want to keep pushed down. He can never sit still bar a few tender moments with Felicia, and there’s a deep irony to the fact that he’s never without a cigarette, yet his wife develops cancer.
Make-up is at its zenith in Maestro, though, and the department does a terrific job of depicting both Bernstein and Felicia throughout their respective ages, from their 20s to their elder years. Cooper does a commendable job of playing Bernstein but is admittedly overshadowed by his co-star Mulligan, the real star of the movie, intense throughout. One brilliant scene sees the pair go hammer and tongs against one another in an argument that has been bubbling for decades, and it’s here that shows Mulligan’s quality as an actor playing an actor.
It’s hard to understand what Maestro’s intention is, though. To show Bernstein’s brilliance or portray him as a bit of an egotistical asshole that largely neglected his family despite that brilliance? Whatever Cooper’s intention, he seems to have been able to give a surprising insight into the life of one of the most celebrated figures in the music world. As the film’s title suggests, Bernstein could never just be Bernstein but would forever become Maestro, the man with magic at his fingertips.
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