Maestro is an excellent new film , written, directed and starring Bradley Cooper. Cooper also wrote, directed and costarred (with Lady Gaga) in
A Star Is Born (2018), and this one is just as good, and some say even better. After a short theatrical release, it is now available on Netflix.
Maestro is about the brilliant composer, musician, conductor and activist Leonard Bernstein, played by Cooper. At just over two hours, there’s no way any film can fully encapsulate the life of someone so prolific and complicated as Lenny Bernstein; and Cooper wisely does not try. The picture covers approximately 45 years of the musician’s life, but as far as his creative resume goes, Cooper paints that picture in broad strokes.
We see Lenny take advantage of his first big opportunity in 1943 - just after his appointment as the new assistant conductor of the New York– when he is asked on very short notice to conduct the orchestra in a nationally broadcast concert, after a famous guest conductor fell ill. Lenny does so, brilliantly, in a memorable and moving scene, and his career starts to grow Soon he’s composing music and collaborating with choreographer Jerome Robbins (Michael Urie), and lyricists Adolph Green (Nick Blaimere) and Betty Comden (Mallory Portnoy) to produce the hit Broadway musical On the Town in 1944. In the latter part of the film, Cooper recreates one of the great moments in Bernstein’s conducting career, leading the London Symphony Orchestra and a full chorus at England’s gorgeous Ely Cathedral in a magnificent production of Mahler’s powerful Resurrection Symphony (so moving, it brought tears to my eyes).
Yet, although musical and conversational references are made, we are shown nothing of Bernstein’s best known work, West Side Story – first staged in 1957 – presumably because most of us already know about that. Lots of other career highlights are elided as well. Why? Because Bernstein’s brilliant career is only part of Maestro’s story.
The core of this picture is meant to be about his love affair with and marriage to Bernstein's wife, the actress Felicia Montealegre (a
fabulous Carey Mulligan). In Cooper’s telling, this was a rich and beautiful relationship. Also a dramatic one. Bernstein could not have been an easy spouse to live with. He was ambitious, energetic, extroverted, a workaholic, composing, collaborating, teaching, and - as a world class conductor, lecturer, and public personality, nearly always traveling. Lenny was also a most charming party guest in New York’s social environment, not to mention a world class flirt and something of a libertine. Oh, and – no small thing – he was gay (more likely bisexual) at a time when coming out as such clearly was not an option. At the same time, Lenny was also very much in love with and, at his core, loyal to Felicia.
Together, Cooper and Mulligan, make the case that Felicia is the hero of the piece, the glue holding both Lenny and their family (including three children) together. Her fortitude under the circumstances is remarkably heroic, although I doubt she saw it that way. Rather, Maestro suggests, Felicia well understood the bargain she was making in teaming up with her charismatic husband and felt that, on balance, it was worth it.
Maestro, like last year’s
Tár, includes a lot of lovely music (most of which consists of Bernstein compositions) and some of the most exciting and affecting musical performances I’ve seen in a long while. Bernstein was an energetic and demonstrative conductor; and Cooper plays him in the conducting sequences quite convincingly. Although much has been made of the prosthetic nose he used to make himself more closely resemble Bernstein, I think it works just fine. In fact, the makeup, hairdressing and prosthetics departments all deserve kudos for their work – allowing Cooper to play this man convincingly over a span of decades.
This picture is highly recommended.
2 hours 7 minutes
Grade: A-
Streaming on Netflix.
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