It’s rare a film is so lacking that it actually prompts one, after seeing it, to literally dream about being ripped off. But that’s what happened to me after spending two hours and nine minutes watching Netflix’s streaming juggernaut, Maestro. I woke up the next morning having dreamt of someone I trusted throughout the dream stealing what I believe was a power washer I’d rented, leaving me with the bill for its cost.
I know Bradley Cooper walks on water for some people. And his acting is always stellar: Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, even that remake of A Star is Born, all proved him as one of our country’s best actors. And he’s a Philly native so I hate to rag on him, truly I do. But if Maestro, a portrayal of the life of Leonard Bernstein, was a vanity project for Cooper (which by many indications it is, Cooper having co-written and directed it, apparently at the behest of Steven Spielberg), it’s one that left me cold. Of course, your mileage may vary.
The following are spoilers so if you want to see this movie, you may want to skip this and go right to the comments.
First let’s be clear: this is a movie we’re, really, pointedly supposed to like. To hold in esteem. To appreciate for its artistic sensibility. More than half the film is in black and white, presumably to lend an aura of seriousness to its portrayal. Except for the scenes from the 70’s onward, which are inexplicably in color, suggesting — I don’t know — the heyday of Kodachrome, I suppose.
And Bradley Cooper’s acting is good, if by “good” you understand it to accurately portray the character of a self-absorbed fop apparently clueless as to how his behavior comes off in public or in private. Perhaps that is the point: Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein is strangely deficient in appealing (or even interesting) personal qualities, particularly as he gets older; if this was meant as a hagiography of sorts it really, really falls flat. But one of the biggest problems I had with the film is having to literally strain to understand what the hell he was saying. Cooper’s Bernstein talks so fast and in such a low tone in some scenes that I was tempted to rewind them, simply to figure out if there was a critical plot point hidden in there. He grins, he giggles, he cheats on his wife. He utters some fairly vapid platitudes about his art, and then he grins, gets drunk, and cheats some more.
Look, maybe that’s the way Bernstein was, but I have the sneaking suspicion that the intent was to have an unfamiliar, uninitiated audience identify with him, or at least be curious enough to further explore and appreciate the wonderful music he created. And you can’t identify with someone who, thanks to the filmmaker, you simply don’t like. Carey Mulligan, who plays Bernstein’s long-suffering wife is equally tasked with portraying someone fairly lacking in much appeal. Hint: When your main character (she gets billing over Cooper himself in the credits) slowly dies of breast and lung cancer, it helps if you actually care about her. I just didn’t; the film generally evokes pity for her state rather than admiration.
There are a number of tricky modern film techniques and transitions that I’m guessing I was supposed to marvel at. But none of them struck me as particularly groundbreaking. And there are a couple of scenes — including a really superfluous one depicting Bernstein and his family dancing — that appear to be an excuse to fill time. This is unfortunately a common practice lately in American films (the exception is Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, which slyly succeeded in parodying that motif). At least in Bollywood they generally save those scenes for the very end of the movie.
My synopsis of the film as I came away from it goes something like this: well-off, entitled, talented guy gets lucky break conducting, and goes on to succeed while cheating on his wife with various young, adoring men, and while agonizing about his own lack of creative (“composing”) output, leaving the couple more and more estranged. I didn’t really get a sense — at all, in fact — of Bernstein’s actual genius (actually after seeing this film I came away having doubts) although one scene where Cooper/Bernstein emotionally conducts a dark and bombastic (it’s Mahler) classical mass in a church I’m too ignorant to identify (the film doesn’t let us know; Google tells me it was the Ely Cathedral in England) — is clearly supposed to fill me with awe. But it didn’t, mostly because the scene appears out of nowhere with no clear explanation (Apparently Cooper practiced conducting for six years to accurately reproduce Bernstein’s mannerisms here).
Sadly, after having seen this movie, I didn’t like Bernstein, I didn’t like his family, I didn’t like his friends, and I didn’t really care about his wife, a Broadway actress named Felicia Montealegre who (regrettably) I’ve just never heard of and spends most of the movie either archly flirting with Bernstein (at the beginning) or stoically stifling a sob (most of the rest). In one scene she leaps into a swimming pool and holds her breath underwater, which I take is metaphoric for her sacrificing most of her acting career to hang out with this guy, but honestly, it just seemed trite. I kind of wished she’d stayed down there, if for no other reason than to get away from this movie.
My frank takeaway, again sadly, was that virtually everyone portrayed in the movie was basically an effete snob. There are some long interminable scenes of various hoity-toity, pretentious house parties, presumably in New York City, which do nothing but emphasize the hermetic bubble of privilege these people apparently inhabit. I don’t understand how any of these scenes — populated by people who aren’t really explained — contributed to Bernstein’s art, or the film for that matter. There is next to nothing conveying any real, soul-searching, artistic struggle here, nor is there much if any acknowledgment of the historical, social and cultural markers contextualizing the arc of Bernstein’s life (except, I guess, for one scene depicting him snorting cocaine). I guess we’re supposed to conclude that his sexuality and the conflicts arising from it were the whole driving force of his art, since that’s really the only insight into his character Cooper provides.
And that’s too bad. There are plenty of good biographies about Bernstein, his life and his work out there that resemble nothing like the fairly one-dimensional person depicted in this movie.
For example, Bernstein was among those blacklisted in the McCarthy era:
In 1950, Bernstein's music was banned at overseas State Department functions, and 1951 Bernstein found himself — alongside other creatives, including fellow composer Aaron Copland — in the FBI Security Index, unambiguously marked “Communist.” He had his passport revoked in 1953, and even after he got it back, he was subject to intense FBI investigation.
Though Bernstein made it out of McCarthy's private hell he was still under the watchful eye of the government, in no small part because of his involvement with the Black Panther Party. In 1970, Bernstein and his wife Felicia hosted a party (which Bernstein would insist was a “meeting”) to raise funds for the Panthers and their legal fees. Writer Tom Wolfe detailed the encounter in an article for New York magazine. Despite the evening's rather innocuous beginnings, it erupted into a passionate discourse around identity politics — blackness, Jewishness, richness and poorness.
During WWII Bernstein “intentionally employed dancers from marginalized groups in his ballets and, in 1944, featured Japanese and Black dancers “in order to push against xenophobia and racism.”’ He was also one of the first major artists to raise awareness about AIDS fundraising in 1983, well before Ronald Reagan would even utter the word “AIDS.”
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Bernstein was one of the first public advocates for AIDS research, raising $1.7 million in 1987 for a community-based clinical trials program run by the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR).
I think one of the problems that I had was that I’d actually watched a truly off-the-scale, magnificent film about another composer the day before. That film was Milos Forman’s Amadeus and the composer was Wolfgang Mozart. But that film had a plot (and an extremely clever one at that). This one does not. Cooper holds a cigarette in every (and I mean every) scene. OK, maybe Bernstein did that, according to Wikipedia he had emphysema since he was in his 50’s. But if I’m focusing on the cigarette literally for two hours rather than what is (often unintelligibly) coming out of the actor’s mouth, I just feel something is terribly amiss.
So upon waking up from that annoying dream about being ripped off, I looked around the interwebs to see if my perception was just mistaken. Here are some of the reactions I found in compiled in The Daily Beast. (Note: Naturally, I only refer you to those opinions that agree with mine).
(This will probably be the only time in my life I agree with Meghan McCain).
And sadly, this person also gets it right in my view:
With so much of our culture slowly slipping away down the memory hole it would have been nice to see a film that prompted more of an appreciation of the man’s contributions to this nation and its musical culture than simply focus relentlessly on his personal foibles. Cooper’s film doesn’t do that, and it’s a shame that when young people recall Leonard Bernstein the first place they’ll probably look to is this particular version of his life.