By Jake Wilson
MAESTRO ★★★
(M) 129 minutes
Never mind Bradley Cooper’s prosthetic nose, the film grain is real. That’s one takeaway from Maestro, in which Cooper directs himself as the celebrated American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. Maestro is a Netflix production, but it needs to be seen in a cinema to appreciate the richness of Matthew Libatique’s 35-millimetre cinematography, especially in the second half, which switches from high-contrast black-and-white to saturated colour: a kind of visual pleasure not available from many films.
Bradley Cooper stars as US composer Leonard Bernstein in Maestro.
In other respects, a Bernstein biopic in 2023 is a tricky proposition. At the height of his 20th century fame, Bernstein was almost uniquely successful in bridging the gap between high culture (Beethoven) and the popular music of his era (Broadway show tunes).
Today, he remains a recognisable name in a fair proportion of households, but not much of his output as a composer, beyond the score to West Side Story and the song New York, New York, is familiar except to aficionados.
Cooper’s approach – this is his second film as director, after 2018’s A Star is Born – acknowledges as much. Bernstein’s music is there on the soundtrack, but Maestro makes no attempt to encompass all the highlights of his professional career, most of which takes place offscreen.
Nor is much attention given to Bernstein’s outspoken leftism, which resulted in his passport being revoked by the US State Department in the McCarthy era and later inspired the essayist Tom Wolfe to coin the mocking phrase “radical chic”.
Carey Mulligan plays Bernstein’s wife Felicia Montealegre in Maestro, which moves from black and white to saturated colour.
This is a portrait of the private individual, where everything emanates from Cooper’s virtuoso performance or rather his successive performances, first as the eager, brilliant, slightly manic young Bernstein, then as the more formal but still mercurial older man.
It’s not a straightforward impersonation, in that a good deal of work has gone into pointing up the significance of the details: Bernstein the conductor is faintly evident in how Cooper handles his cigarettes, while the gravelly yet nasal voice hints at blockage in the most elegant possible way.
The nature of that blockage is Maestro’s real theme: the principal drama of Bernstein’s life story as told here lies in the fact he stayed married to a woman, the actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), while continuing to pursue affairs with men.
At times, the film appears to be presenting us with the crudely Freudian notion that Bernstein’s sexual conflicts were the source of his artistic drive, as when a dream ballet surrounds him with seductively gyrating sailors, or when he’s up on the podium working himself into a state of sweaty euphoria.
Cooper does better in the long, fraught dialogue scenes designed as duets for him and Mulligan, often filmed from afar in the manner of an impossibly lush verite documentary. But under the circumstances, there’s something weirdly askew about centring the film on Bernstein and Montealegre as a couple, while Bernstein’s male lovers remain on the sidelines.
It’s as if the goal were to sell this marriage as a grandly tragic romance, the tragedy lying in the fact Bernstein wasn’t straight.
Elsewhere, we seem intended to think of Bernstein as a victim of his narrow-minded times, or as lacking the courage to be his truest self. Frankly, either proposition feels a little patronising for a man who lived a fuller life than most. Still, none of this prevents the film from functioning as a retro luxury item in the manner of the TV series Mad Men, a daydream of a repressed yet glamorous past, when everyone spoke well and knew how to dress and smoked wherever they pleased.
Maestro is released in cinemas on December 7, and streams on Netflix from December 20.
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