Maestro: Requiem for the Agony and Ectasy of an American Master Maestro

Maestro is a towering and fearless love story chronicling the lifelong relationship between Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein. A love letter to life and art, Maestro at its core is an emotionally epic portrayal of family and love.

Review:

Maestro, Bradley Cooper’s emotional biography of Leonard Bernstein’s (Cooper) marriage, bisexuality and musical success opens with a big broad swoosh of his hands opening the drapes, seeing the opportunity that the new day provides and doing syncopated drum beats on his male lover’s tushie. From then on exuberance for life, art, work, others will be the dominant emotional beats, with anything that detracts from that being the dissonance and counterpoint.

Cooper explores Bernstein’s success on an emotional level, the ups and downs, the tolls of both success and failure, conducting a great amount of sympathy for the man, with the soundtrack being the music he made and that he loved. The narrative never severs Bernstein’s music from the man. You can’t say that’s it’s an adapted score but a conducted one that doesn’t stray much from the maestro’s hand. The man wrote and conducted ballets, operas, musicals, scores for some classic films, got Grammy, Emmys and a few Oscar nominations. There is a rich and abundantly source for the score.

Maestro is more ambitious than Cooper’s debut a Star Is Born. Cooper wrote Maestro in conjunction with Josh Singer (Spotlight) and its more self-consciously cinematic sophomore effort, a film made to be seen as being rehearsed, conducted and performed. It uses black and white and color film, different aspect ratios, stock simulated to look like the dominant cinematic palette of the time. The image up there emphasizes interiority, swells of moods and feelings, trying to make the explosive, ecstatically physical film Bernstein would of made of himself, one that shows every bit of sweat and effort, something akin to his conducting style.

Cooper doesn’t layer Maestro with a lot of exposition, expecting the audience (both film, music and musical fans) to know the history and feel superior seeing the Easter Eggs and name dropping, the cameos of the famous at the time. This allows Cooper to do a lot of compression of characters and plots. He knows the audience will be able to fill in the missing historical details so he can get the feelings right and ringing authentic. The emphasis is not on the work (you hear it in practically every frame) but the relationships- with his wife- Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein (a fine Carey Mulligan), lovers, family and colleagues.

Bernstein’s bisexuality makes for a more complicated love story and triangle. Everything is part of his performance piece and inspiration. The constant dance pieces that eventually include Bernstein as a semi-erotic participant are a good case in point. The exhilaration only flags as Felicia’s anxieties and jealousies start to take the forefront and pull Bernstein from his musical love. Even in his darker, sadder, despairing moments he never flags, just becomes mature, adapting to the crisis of the moment.

Cooper and Mulligan never really have a strong screen chemistry. Their love is genuine but it never is the exclusive one and the slight physical connection emphasizes that point. They love each other but in different interior and emotional ways. Felicia eventually understands that Bernstein love can’t be confined to one exclusive person or idea. It’s really Maestro family scenes and the one’s with Bernstein’s friends that are the film’s center. The tenderest moment is when Bernstein lets his male lover hold his newborn baby, see its face. It’s both cruel to his wife yet honest to the lies he must keep secret to be successful and happy.