Review: Maestro falls flat
I formed my first impression of Leonard Bernstein when I was still in high school. In those days, I’d listen to lots of old show tunes on YouTube as I studied, and after months of enjoying various lyrical works by George Gershwin, I discovered a 1976 video recording of Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic at the Royal Albert Hall in a performance of “Rhapsody in Blue.”
I was entranced. Bernstein’s charisma was undeniable. His musicianship astounded me; he conducted the philharmonic while seated behind a grand piano, whence he played each of the piece’s iconic solos. I remember rewatching a passage where he plays a melody with his right hand on the lower end of the instrument – crossed over his left, which keeps the beat – over and over again.
His command not only of the other musicians, but of the television cameras, was electrifying. He was a star as surely as any movie actor, alive in a way that anyone who ever attempts to embody a character onscreen hopes to be.
How poignant, then, to watch Bradley Cooper do just that in Maestro, the new biopic on Bernstein that was both enacted and directed by its leading man. There’ve been months of hype leading up to this performance – packed with “doesn’t-he-look-just-like-him” publicity photos, trailers, and even a nose controversy to boot – so, going into the theater, I felt that I’d seen enough of Cooper to know that he wasn’t going to deliver anything short of remarkable.
Naturally, he is. The commitment is total. The prosthetics are uncanny. Mr. Cooper is a fine actor, and a diligent student of his subject’s personality. Maestro is, if nothing else, a coup of performance.
Indeed, “performance” appears to be the central theme in how Cooper interprets Bernstein’s life. The opening shot of the film finds the great conductor playing the piano in his living room; viewed from behind, he seems to be practicing in solitude. But then the camera continues tracking forward to reveal a full TV documentary crew situated on the opposite side of the room – recording him. The genius at home.
As he plays, Cooper as Bernstein falters. He starts to talk about his deceased wife, Felicia (to be played in subsequent scenes by Carey Mulligan), and how much he misses her.
“‘If summer doesn’t sing in you,’” he muses, “‘then nothing sings in you. And if nothing sings in you, then you can’t make music.’ Something she told me.”
This is the first of many scenes that find Bernstein in an otherwise intimate setting, yet accompanied by recording equipment or some sort of audience: he’s playing the piano at a friend’s cocktail party… he’s dictating notes into a machine while stroking his boyfriend’s (i.e. Matt Bomer’s) feet… he’s speaking to Edward R. Murrow over a live broadcast while seated in the living room of his Manhattan townhouse. According to Cooper’s vision, there were very few moments when Leonard Bernstein wasn’t performing, even among family.
“I love people so much,” he explains, “that it’s hard for me to be alone.” One wonders whether this is true – whether it’s love that the man felt, or a desperation to please. An urgent need to be adored. To be approved of. Desired.
Of course, Bernstein himself had no problem desiring others. The central conflict of Cooper’s film lies between Lenny’s incessant affairs with other men and his marriage to Felicia. It is established that Mme Bernstein knew her partner was bisexual early in their relationship; “I know exactly who you are,” she coos to him mid-courtship, while they’re out on a stroll. “Let’s… give it a whirl.”
A liberated mindset for mid-century America, to be sure – but this attitude comes back to haunt her when, years later, Felicia finds herself stuck with a person who runs about town and philanders with a new, handsome hanger-on every decade or so. Lenny invites his “friends” up to the family home in Connecticut, encourages them to play games with his children.
Meanwhile, the cuckold wife puffs on cigarettes in the other room, or jumps into swimming pools when she finds the household atmosphere too stifling.
All that smoking may have something to do with why Felicia eventually contracts lung cancer. The final days of her life find Ms. Mulligan in a headscarf, coughing and swooning. She lays in bed and breathes shakily while basking in the last rays of sun she’ll ever feel on her skin.
It was at this point while watching Maestro that I thought to myself: “Oh Christ – now it’s a cancer movie.” Because, if you can’t tell from what I’ve written so far, Maestro is trying to be a lot of things – all of them impressive, all of them worthy of attention. Yet there’s only so much a two-hour movie can take, and for all that he does put onscreen, there’s a lot that Mr. Cooper leaves out.
He’s primarily drawn to the Bernsteins’ marriage and, to be fair, it is a fascinating relationship. Mulligan is the greatest actor of her generation, and her scenes with Cooper are striking due to the ease with which they speak to one another. This may be the most authentic depiction of how conversation flows between a couple that I’ve ever seen on film.
But at a certain point, you realize that the conversation has gone on a bit too long; yes, they’re a neat pair, but what about Lenny’s work with the Philharmonic? What about his process?
Cooper’s Bernstein spends a lot of time talking about how much music means to him, how important it is. Yet we rarely get to see him interact with it, either as a composer or as a conductor. The film’s six-and-a-half minute pièce de résistance comes when Bernstein conducts Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony at Ely Cathedral in England – but its endurance simply reads like making up for lost time. It’s Cooper shoving as much conducting into a condensed stretch as possible, both to remind us of Leonard Bernstein’s ability and to give himself a showy scene that justifies or enables his film’s overall domestic tenor.
Music is what makes Bernstein’s story unique, whereas bad marriages are a dime a dozen. This isn’t to say, for instance, that the scenes of Felicia’s illness aren’t affecting. They are; but then again, of course they are. Cancer is sad. The death of a loved one is devastating. Not to sound cynical, but there’s something self- or myth-serving about Maestro’s fixation on the withering away of Bernstein's long-sacrificing, long-suffering wife.
Why does a movie about the preeminent conductor of the twentieth century – a man who knew many of the great personalities of his time, who traveled the world and espoused a deathless intellectual relationship with music – spend so much time pouring over what went down between husband and wife? To what end does it aim?
The short answer to that question is this: to make his children happy.
Originally set to be directed by Martin Scorsese, then Steven Spielberg, Maestro was made with the full endorsement of Bernstein’s three children. They signed off on everything – including the nose – and permitted Cooper’s production to shoot at their family’s actual homestead in Fairfield, Connecticut.
Not every biographer is entitled to such access: before watching the movie, I started reading a thirty-year-old book about Bernstein in which its author, Meryle Secrest, mentions that she was denied entry to the conductor’s archives. This is because his estate had promised exclusive access to a commissioned (i.e. paid) biographer.
Furthermore, though her subject was in the final years of his life, Secrest wasn’t allowed to speak to Mr. Bernstein because he was “contractually bound not to do so.” And none of his children spoke to her – due to, in Secrest’s words, “a variety of reasons.”
Jamie, Alexander, and Nina are the gatekeepers of the Bernstein legacy; it is important to stress that Maestro would not have been made without their full cooperation. That’s a lot of power, and while it’s easy to understand why a family would want to ensure its fair treatment by outside parties, it’s equally easy to wonder at the partiality of said family’s judgment.
The preciousness with which Leonard Bernstein’s estate is guarded renders this movie exceptional, yes, but it also invites suspicion. There’s a lot of baggage that comes with being the “official” interpretation: are we watching an intuitive artistic gesture, or a political truce?
This isn’t to discredit Mr. Cooper’s artistry, though his involvement in the project – and his agreement to its patrilineal terms – says something of his evolving artistic identity. If we look at his two existent directorial efforts, it seems the man likes stories about musicians whose manipulative, strained relationships with their womenfolk are justified through egocentric postulations about artistic nobility: in A Star is Born, a fading country music star dies by suicide so as not to further inconvenience the career of the woman he loves, while in Maestro, a venerated conductor allows his humiliated wife to die a martyr so he might view himself as an all-the-more-tragic hero.
I don’t know Bradley Cooper, and cannot speak to his private life. But to hear him talk about himself in interviews – telling Spielberg that Maestro was the first film he ever directed “fearlessly” – is to hear a man who stands at the center of his own universe.
In that regard, at least, he has everything in common with the man he’s devoted himself to portraying.
Which brings me to my key takeaway from Maestro: despite the efforts of their children, it is evident that Leonard and Felicia Bernstein were flat-out narcissists. They were addicted to themselves, or to their idea of themselves. They thrived upon being glamorous victims; they relished their roles as important yet unhappy people.
They were begging to have a biopic made about their lives, because they lived their lives in performance. Every waking moment was spent setting the stage for this – a retrospective production of their marital drama.
It is because Mr. Cooper gives himself over to this man’s, this couple’s, this family’s perception of itself that his film never quite gains solid footing. Frankly, it’s something of a mess. Cohesive theme notwithstanding, Maestro leaps from era to era – skimming over decades of professional activity, avoiding art in favor of hurt feelings. Poetic compositions take the place of critical analysis; we’re treated to yet another fifteen minutes in Fairfield rather than a fresh fifteen minutes at the Metropolitan Opera. Even Bernstein’s queerness is minimized: Cooper’s and Josh Singer’s screenplay frames the man’s bisexuality as a disruptive or intrusive influence — just another “part” of a “contradictory” man, rather than a comprehensive articulation of his whole life.
Truthfully, I don’t know if Maestro could’ve ever been anything other than what it is. Given the conditions under which it was produced, it was always due to be a competent, sensitive, yet acquiescent study in one man’s egoic grandiosity. It is a film to make his children weep, and to make the rest of us – unrelated to yet not unaffected by Leonard Bernstein – shrug, and go back to YouTube.
