A film review by Craig J. Koban January 10, 2024

MAESTRO ½

2023, R, 130 mins.

Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealerge  /  Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein  /  Matt Bomer as David Oppenheim  /  Maya Hawke as Jamie Bernstein  /  Sarah Silverman as Shirley Bernstein  /  Sam Nivola as Alexander Bernstein  /  Michael Urie as Jerry Robbins  /  Gideon Glick as Tommy Cothran  /  Miriam Shor as Cynthia O'Neal  /  William Hill as Joseph  /  Oscar Pavlo as Claudio Arrau  /  Mallory Portnoy as Betty Comden  /  Sara Sanderson as Lil Hart  /  Kate Eastman as Ellen Adler

ORIGINAL FILM

I had a reasonable knowledge base about Leonard Bernstein before watching writer/director Bradley Cooper's MAESTRO.  

I know that he was one of the most internationally acclaimed composers of all time.  He was also a humanitarian, teacher, and author.  He was also the very first American-born composer to achieve massive worldwide accolades.  He was the recipient of numerous awards, including seven Emmys, two Tony Awards, 16 Grammy Awards, and one Oscar nomination (his music for WEST SIDE STORY has been entrenched in the minds of filmgoers for decades).  There is no question that Bernstein was a once in a generation kind of prestigious talent and deserved the success he received throughout his career and up until his death in 1990.  

One of my main misgivings with Cooper's MAESTRO is that I never really grew to learn much more about this man and legend by the time the end credits rolled by.  

Obviously, Bernstein was a seismic figure in the musical arts, and Cooper does a fairly solid job exploring how his obsession with his craft led to him becoming narcissistically self-absorbed in it to the point where it affected most of his key relationships around him.  As a portrait of a fanatical artist that didn't let anything step in his way, MAESTRO is finely attuned.  But what of the man himself?  What of his musical genius?  What about his craft?  What about his closeted homosexual existence? What about his fractured marriage to Felicia Montealegre?  Sadly, Cooper deals with a majority of these elements in distractingly oblique ways all throughout MAESTRO.  His film is certainly one of the best looking of the year and boasts Oscar caliber costumes, art direction, set design, and makeup (more on all of that in a bit) and has commendably committed performances, but all of this bravura technical craftsmanship can't hide the fact that this is a dramatically negligible endeavor.  That's a large shame, seeing as Cooper previously made a gigantic splash with his directorial debut in A STAR AS BORN (not only one of the best films of its year, but also one of the finest remakes of all time), but here he doesn't seem equal to the task of fully and properly exploring Bernstein.     

And don't get me wrong, MAESTRO is an unendingly ambitious film, but it's also an undisciplined one that seems to be all over the place in terms of focus.  Speaking of which, the story itself is not so much a standard order biopic of Bernstein's life, but rather a series of interconnected snapshots of various parts of his career - spanning nearly 50 years between 1943 and the late 80s - that are essentially broken up into covering his musical pursuits, marriage, and his guarded gay relationships on the side.  MAESTRO introduces us to an elderly Bernstein (Cooper) slaving away at a piano while conducting a TV interview, still showing the same sort of fervent drive that motivated his entire career.  The film then becomes more self-reflective and whisks us back to the 40s, during which time we're introduced to a younger Bernstein developing his complex and meticulous working style.  He has lofty ambitions and hardly seems to have any time for other pursuits, but secretly he was a lover of men and wanted love reciprocated back.  When he meets aspiring actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), something ethereal sparks in both of them, and they soon find themselves in a romantic relationship, which latter consummates in a marriage and children.  

He admires Felicia and genuinely cares for her, but deep down his heart is simply not into his marriage at all, mostly because of his musical aspirations and, yes, the sad fact that he was a closeted gay man during a time when coming out would have been a death sentence on multiple levels.  As the decades progress, Bernstein starts to see the successful fruits of his labors, and even manages to gain notoriety in Hollywood for his aforementioned WEST SIDE STORY work.  The film industry could not contain him, though, as he strove to develop his talents and become more sophisticated in his tastes and craft.  He would also continue to yearn for same-sex companionship, which saw him having many lovers in secret (including one played by Matt Boomer), which obviously created emotional wedges between him and his wife and children (including one played by Maya Hawke).  Predictably, all of this innuendo causes Felicia to turn on Bernstein, which causes him to deal with his mistakes head-on while striving to be the best in his very competitive field.      

One of MAESTRO's strongest attributes is how immaculate it looks.  Cooper, to his very credit, is a superlative natural filmmaker on a technical level, with A STAR IS BORN and now this being no exceptions.  I admired the stylistic flavor that he and cinematographer Matthew Libatique bring to the table here in terms of visually delineating the multiple time periods in the story.  For scenes occurring in the 40s through 50s, they opt to use a Hollywood Golden Age 1.33 to 1 aspect ratio and lush black and white cinematography.  When the film segues to later decades (like the 60s and 70s), the color palette opens up with a Technicolor sheen and vibrancy while maintaining the Academy aspect ratio.  By the time the film hits the 80s, Cooper and Libatique open up the matte to widescreen and use more modern filmmaking flourishes.  It's all pretty breathtaking to view and take in, and all of this is done in concert with stupendous costume and art design that gives all of these respective eras a level of grounded immediacy and verisimilitude.  The makeup work by Kazu Hiro is pretty extraordinary too (he won as Oscar for THE DARKEST HOUR, which transformed Gary Oldman in Winston Churchill).  There was ample pre-release controversy about Cooper using a large prosthetic nose to inhabit Bernstein, but it should be noted that the real man's children defended and supported the creative choice.  That, and Hiro's old-age make-up is so eerily convincing for those 80s scenes that Cooper all but disappears; he's certainly a frontrunner for another Oscar for his work here.

In terms of psychologically portraying Bernstein's insatiable thirst for artistic perfection, MAESTRO captures - as mentioned - this man's meteoric highs and devastating lows in authentic fashion.  Cooper is wise to use Bernstein's actual music throughout the film to emotionally catalog certain key moments in his life (I especially appreciated the usage of WEST SIDE STORY prologue cues to accentuate a particularly stressful moment of marital growing pains for Bernstein and Felecia).  MAESTRO builds to one mightily impressive crescendo that showcases Bernstein leading the London Symphony Orchestra in Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony No. 2 at Ely Cathedral in 1973.  Cooper lets his camera glide effortlessly in and out and around Bernstein as he uses his entire body and soul to make this musical piece as majestic as possible.  It has been reported that Cooper spent half a decade learning how to conduct this six-minute recreation, and it shows.  It's one of the film's most powerful sequences and deep dives audiences right into its subject's ravenous passions to make every piece he's a part of note perfect.  It's as great of a moment of ecstasy as I've seen in any recent movie.     

Yet, this movie is still so mournfully frustrating to sit through.  MAESTRO shows Bernstein in his element, yes, but has so very little to say about how he created his music.  That seems like an obvious missed opportunity here, not to mention that most of his most memorable musical accomplishments are never really given any screen time.  Music was this man's main love in life, but MAESTRO seems too reticent to cover it in any compelling and revealing fashion.  His music seems oddly downplayed throughout.  Instead, Cooper and his screenwriter Josh Singer seem more invested in the soap opera machinations of his failed marriage with Felicia and his affairs with other men.  Obviously, his ultimately doomed union with his wife needed to be covered here, but it's done so fleetingly over the course of this film's decades-spanning arc that I found myself never really gaining a strong vantage point of who Felicia was and how she really figured into this man's life.  And as for Bernstein's homosexuality, Cooper and Singer do it a vast disservice by pitching it more towards the fringe of the narrative and only addressing it when required.  There's a moment in the film when Bernstein has what should be an emotionally ravaging and tearful goodbye to his long-time partner played by Boomer, but this lover is so sketchily developed that this scene never earns any potent impact.  

Perhaps the overall approach Cooper uses here is suspect.  Trying to cram in such a large chunk of a man's life within the confines of a two-hour-plus movie seems like a hopelessly difficult task.  Cooper tries to accommodate, but that leaves MAESTRO feeling more than a bit meandering and untidy when it comes to his scene and time period shifting.  That, and the whole film feels - at times - sloppily episodic in nature and feels like its trying to paint its subject in broad strokes versus getting into the real minutia of what made him truly tick.  I enjoyed the early moments of Bernstein and Felicia meeting and discovery how they mutually nurtured their respective talents, but the remainder of the film rarely cuts deep when it comes to their thorny union.  I haven't spoken much about Cooper and Mulligan's performances yet, and the two of them are admirably in tune with these characters to the point where they disappear within them.  Having said that, there's a mannered showiness to their performances that oftentimes neuters some of the dramatic payoffs that this film desperately wants to have.