Movie Review: 'Maestro'

Maestro (2023)

Directed by Bradley Cooper

Written by Bradley Cooper, Josh Singer

Starring Bradley Cooper, Carey Mulligan. Maya Hawke, Matt Bomer

Release Date November 22nd, 2023

Published December 26th, 2023

There are many things to like about Bradley Cooper's Maestro. This biopic of legendary composer Leonard Bernstein is incredible to look at. Cooper and his cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, and production designer, Kevin Thompson, have put exceptional craft into the movie. Several of the films scenes simply pop off the screen in composition, detail, and the use of color. There is no denying that Bradley Cooper has a wonderful directorial eye aided by an exceptional team behind him. Where Maestro falters, sadly, is storytelling where the tenets of the movie biopic restrict and restrain. It's as if there was simply too much life in Leonard Bernstein to be constricted to the film form.

Maestro begins its story with Leonard Bernstein being interviewed about his life and reflecting mostly on his beloved wife Felicia. Then we are thrown into a flashback, black and white, a young and eager Leonard Bernstein gets the phone call that will change his life. The main conductor of the New York Philharmonic is ill and cannot perform. His replacement is snowed in upstate. The 25 year old Bernstein with no rehearsal time, will have to fill in. He crushes it, he delivers an incredible performance that skyrockets his career.

Meanwhile, in his private life, Bernstein is enjoying life as a gay man in New York, collaborating on various musical projects and spending time with his lover, David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer). These moments are brief but show a playful and wildly creative Bernstein constantly in creative mode, in the flower of his youth. Soon after however, he's met a woman at a party. Her name is Felicia (Carey Mulligan) and the two spark immediate chemistry. It's never stated that Bernstein is bisexual and the movie is remarkably vague on this point, perhaps because, until late in his life, Bernstein himself was vague on this point.

The two undergo a whirlwind romance accompanied by Bernstein's remarkable successes on the stage, screen, and as a composer of numerous symphonies. A lovely scene has Bernstein take Felicia to the stage where a musical he's working on with Jerome Robbins is rehearsing. Leonard and Felicia get swept up in the dance rehearsal before being pulled apart. The symbolism rages aloud in this scene as the two sides of Bernstein's sexuality are pulled in different directions, one toward Felicia, one away from her. Dancers keep pulling both in different directions with Felicia imagining a man who might have taken her from Bernstein earlier in their life. It's an exceptional and exciting sequence that demonstrates Cooper's terrific direction.

Sadly, the movie never approaches this kind of graceful, layered storytelling again. From this point on, Maestro appears to be racing to the end and a bravura final conducting performance by Cooper that recreates Bernstein's signature, a very physical style of conducting a symphony. Soaked in sweat and opining on his approach to leading an orchestra, you get the cathartic sense that regardless of the alienation he often felt in his personal life, the guilt he felt for the way he neglected his wife, Felicia, the sense of relief at seeming to earn her forgiveness, when Bernstein was leading a symphony, he was secure, content, and fully at home.

Maestro stars our ambitious co-writer and filmmaker, Bradley Cooper, as the beloved composer. Cooper's take on the character of Leonard Bernstein is sweaty and broad. It's not bad acting, it's just A LOT of acting. It's often capital A-Acting. By that I mean that Cooper is sweating and straining to demonstrate the acting that he's doing and in doing so much he becomes a bit of a cartoon. It's as if, in Cooper's conception, Bernstein rarely had a quiet moment, a moment of peace. Everything is performance. In some ways, that does work, Bernstein's life was, in many ways performative, but it's a lot. It's often just a little too big.

The same can be said of Carey Mulligan as Bernstein's long-suffering wife and muse, Felicia Montaleagre. Like Cooper, Mulligan is big and broad in every line delivery and every physical display. Her line deliveries drip with the pretentious air of a performance. Again, I can see where that could be intended, that this over acting is, perhaps, intended to convey how much Felicia, like Leonard, was playing a part in her own life, constantly acting out what was expected of her. That said, it's a lot and these big broad choices often rob the characters of a sense of an actual existence.

The purpose of the bigness, the broad quality of performance that extends to supporting players like Sarah Silverman as Bernstein's sister and, to an extent, Matt Bomer as Bernstein's ever so brief male love interest, is to present Bernstein's life as a performance, a staged event. Bernstein scripted and performed his life story. This is reflected in one of the early inventive visual elements of Maestro as Bernstein gets his big break. In black and white, a phone rings, Bernstein answers and it's the New York Philharmonic calling. Prominent in the scene is a large curtain with light peaking around the edges. The visual indication is a curtain about to open to reveal our players. Bradley Cooper has a knack for these kind of visuals. See my article on how he uses visual filmmaking remarkably well in his directorial debut, A Star is Born.

Unfortunately, the elusive and relatively well hidden life of Leonard Bernstein never gains much depth during Maestro. Bernstein clearly troubled, he longs to live authentically but has a stronger desire for not getting caught or making too many waves. As he gets older, the anxiety that drove him to hide his secrets gives way to a nasty hedonism expressed in Bernstein's blatant flaunting of his proclivities in front of Felicia. It's not a terrible character journey but it's so rushed it becomes incomprehensible at certain points. Bernstein the man becomes elusive and fails to take a complete form. The film infers a lot and ultimately is incapable of taking us intimately into Bernstein's view of the world or his place within it.

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