Maestro
Bradley Cooper directs and stars in a showy, warts-and-all portrait of the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein.
Genius at work: Bradley as Bernstein
A year ago, Cate Blanchett mesmerised audiences with her interpretation of an egocentric, homosexual, utterly brilliant classical conductor. Her performance secured her an Oscar nomination and should have won her the statuette. This month Bradley Cooper plays an egocentric, homosexual, utterly brilliant classical conductor and he, too, will nab an Oscar nomination (next month). While Blanchett should have won for Tár, Bradley Cooper has a better chance to snatch the golden prize as he’s playing a real-life character and had to learn to conduct and play the piano (as did Blanchett) behind transfiguring make-up. However, the fact that Cooper is not Jewish and is playing the Jewish conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein could play against him in these uncertain times. He is also the director, producer and co-writer of Maestro, a film that exhibits a mastery of its medium from the opening frame unto the last. Indeed, it is a veritable jigsaw of bravura moments.
Back in 2018, Bradley Cooper showed what an accomplished filmmaker he was with his directorial debut A Star is Born, a film which walked away with eight Oscar nominations but failed to recognise him as director. As they said at the time, it must have directed itself. If Maestro is to suffer a similar fate for the actor-director, it is because Cooper draws attention to his own virtuosity. It is a film easier to admire than to love.
Even so, films about geniuses invariably make for fascinating copy and Bernstein proves no exception to the rule of the brilliant, complicated, bipolar, philandering, temperamental, frenetic and maddeningly mercurial maestro. Regarded as the first truly great American conductor, he was as prodigiously versatile as he was self-exacting, raising the bar of several American genres and winning a walk-in closet of trophies, including sixteen Grammys, seven Emmys and two Tonys. Besides his orchestral, symphonic and ballet compositions, he also garnered recognition for his scores to West Side Story and On the Town and to the Elia Kazan film On the Waterfront.
Although Bradley Cooper’s film falls into the trap of many a biopic – its scope is too ambitious for its reach – its episodic nature is swept under the podium via an array of magnificent segues. Let it be known: Cooper does great segue. From the musician’s early days as a gimlet-eyed, chain-smoking, turbo-charged hedonist – filmed in black-and-white – to his later years as a chain-smoking, faithless husband and father, Cooper nails every mannerism, sinus obstruction and flourish. And just as he showcased a magnificent platform for his female lead in A Star is Born (Lady Gaga), here he provides the space for Cary Mulligan to shine as Bernstein’s Chilean-Costa Rican wife, Felicia Montealegre. In fact, the film feels less like a biopic and more of a love story, albeit a troubled one.
Nevertheless, the film’s most arresting moments see Bernstein at work, whether jotting down a score on a ream of sheet music, or to the movie’s most memorable scene when he conducts Mahler’s ‘Resurrection Symphony’ at Ely Cathedral, culminating in a sweat-drenched reconciliation. For that scene alone the man deserves an Academy Award.
It is an exquisitely realised passion project, punctuated with memorable scene after memorable scene, each impeccably framed, sometimes in close-up, sometimes in long shot. It is truly a 100-carat diamond, albeit better to be admired behind a glass display case than to be worn on a necklace close to one’s heart.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Carey Mulligan, Bradley Cooper, Matt Bomer, Maya Hawke, Sarah Silverman, Josh Hamilton, Scott Ellis, Gideon Glick, Sam Nivola, Alexa Swinton, Miriam Shor, Lea Cooper.
Dir Bradley Cooper, Pro Martin Scorsese, Bradley Cooper, Steven Spielberg, Fred Berner, Amy Durning and Kristie Macosko Krieger, Ex Pro Josh Singer, Screenplay Bradley Cooper and Josh Singer, Ph Matthew Libatique, Pro Des Kevin Thompson, Ed Michelle Tesoro, Music Leonard Bernstein, Costumes Mark Bridges, Sound Richard King, Make-up design Kazu Hiro, Dialect coach Tim Monich.
Sikelia Productions/Amblin Entertainment/Lea Pictures/Fred Berner Films-Netflix.
129 mins. USA. 2023. UK and US Rel: 20 December 2023. Cert. 15.
