Attribution: Fernando de Sousa from Melbourne, Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Asking the Right Questions: Film Review of Maestro
By Geoff Carter
To say that a creating a biopic of one of the most revered figures in the history in American music is an ambitious undertaking is a bit of an understatement. Yet Bradley Cooper has not only taken on the gargantuan task of not only writing, producing, and starring in Maestro, this epic biography of composer, conductor, and educator Leonard Bernstein, he also directed the film. Besides being renowned as a world-class conductor, Leonard Bernstein composed movie scores, musicals like West Side Story, and symphonic works. He was a world-class talent, as well as a charming raconteur and sophisticate. He had a loving relationship with his wife and family. He was also a philanderer who indulged in a plethora of sexual liaisons throughout his lifetime, hiding his homosexuality behind a façade of a “normal” nuclear family. In short, not unlike many of us, he was a mass of contradictions.
To focus on the complexities of Bernstein’s behavior and personal life, Cooper chose to use the lens of his relationship with the composer’s wife, the actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) from their initial courtship, through all their rough patches of Bernstein’s infidelities and betrayals, to its bittersweet end. Theoretically, this framing, basing the narrative on Bernstein’s emotional anchor, should serve as a centering of gravity for the film, but somehow it misses the mark, mostly because Cooper’s Bernstein is immune to any sort of emotional gravity—he flies along at his own pace and in his own direction. He sleeps around, he converses with his muse, he socializes—he composes, conducts, and teaches. The truth is that he seems to get away with selfishly following his own muse—and carnal desires—because he is so gifted and so charming. His enormous persona cannot be denied.
Maestro begins with a quote from Bernstein, “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.”
The film proper begins with an interview of Bernstein in his own home. He plays piano a bit, then speaks about Felicia, his wife, who has apparently passed away. The scene cuts away to a darkened bedroom. A long curtain (resembling a proscenium curtain) shades the lone window. The phone rings and someone answers. From the one-sided conversation, it soon becomes apparent that young assistant conductor Bernstein will substitute for the regular conductor. He awakens and sweeps open the curtain—the film is in black and white. He gives an outstanding performance, and his career is launched.
The film moves into a sequence of Bernstein working with David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer) and other friends on a new musical piece for Jerry Robbins (Michael Urie). With the depth of field, angled shots, and layered dialogue, the section of the film is brilliantly reminiscent of the first section of Citizen Kane, when Charles Foster Kane is starting up his newspaper. This is the first of some extremely well-crafted, albeit puzzling, directorial decisions by Brad Cooper, the director.
The film cuts to a young Felicia on her way to a party in Long Island. There, she meets Bernstein’s sister Shirley (Sarah Silverman), and the maestro himself, and so begins a whirlwind romance. Felicia takes Lenny to a stage where she has him read lines from the play she is in. Then, inexplicably, the film cuts to a dream sequence of three sailors dancing—presumably On the Town—in which Lenny suddenly becomes one of the dancers. It can be argued that this foreshadows Bernstein’s attraction to men and his infidelities to Felicia—and it is a brilliantly shot and choreographed sequence—but it seems out of place in the film.
After the two are married and have had a couple of children, Felicia confesses, during an TV interview, that she believes her greater responsibility is to taking care of her family and Lenny and that her career is secondary which is very typical of the times. Bernstein speaks in the interview of the dichotomy between his inner life of composing and his external existence of conducting and teaching—a split between extroverted and introverted selves that the screenplay tends to gloss over, which is a shame. It is one of the most intriguing parts about the man.
Another sequence in this first section of the film shows the couple lying on the floor in their bedroom, playing a version of truth or dare. Bernstein tells Felicia about dreams about killing his father he had as a child, and that he would awake and continue fantasizing about doing away with the old man. Once again, this element of Bernstein’s psychology is also eschewed in favor of awesome stylistics and disjointed narrative techniques. One scene shows the couple fleeing a dinner, running down a walkway that morphs into a different. Such transitions in space and time can breathtaking and an aesthetically efficient way to compress time in the narrative, in this context it is—again—simply puzzling.
In the next chapter, the film suddenly switches from black and white to color. The Bernsteins, along with their three children, are living a upper middle-class lifestyle in a beautiful suburban home. Felicia is becoming frustrated with Lenny’s growing carelessness about his extracurricular sexual activities to the point where his daughter Jamie (Maya Hawke) is hearing rumors about her father. Things reach a breaking point during Thanksgiving at the couple’s New York City apartment (punctuated by the Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons passing by at eye level), and the couple separate, but do not divorce.
Later, Felicia decides to reconcile and attends a performance of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony in England. Cooper’s rendition of this moment is an absolutely jaw-dropping performance. The actor reportedly spent months learning how to conduct; his depiction of Bernstein at work is simply amazing. After the performance, Leonard and Felicia get back together but shortly afterwards discover that Felicia has lung cancer.
The filmmaker Mike Nichols once said in an interview that every film narrative has a spine, a backbone, a foundation. and that once he discovers this in a story, he can film it. The film Maestro, while based on the life of one of America’s most famous and beloved artistic geniuses, seems to been constructed on a shaky foundation. The story focuses primarily on the love affair between Lenny and Felicia, but their chemistry seems oddly forced, not relaxed or natural. Of course, Bernstein was probably the least relaxed person in existence.
Still, this narrative does not answer, or begin to probe the mystery of Bernstein’s genius and the sources of his self-destructive behavior. It does not explain how a man who treasured his family betrayed them so profoundly and so often. It does not explain his compulsion to work, to create, to absolutely lose himself in the music. It does not address the mystery of the creative mind.
Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, and it is up to the storyteller to make sense of a reality which is mysterious and impenetrable. Mark Twain once said, “It’s no wonder truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.” It’s unfortunate that in constructing this sometimes breathtakingly beautiful film and portraying Bernstein so accurately and brilliantly, in a performance so true to the actual man, that Bradley Cooper seems to have fallen short of helping us understand the man behind the legend.
The quote at the beginning of the film speaks to art posing questions and gleaning meaning from their contradictory answers. Perhaps Mr. Cooper, for all the innovative filmmaking techniques and brilliant acting, did not ask the right questions.