Maestro
Bradley Cooper (2023)
First, let’s get the schnozz out of the way – which Bradley Cooper proves able to do. It’s common knowledge that he wears a prosthetic nose to play Leonard Bernstein in Maestro. Cooper’s own nose is not small. Bernstein’s was considerably larger but he wasn’t Cyrano de Bergerac. Cooper’s use of the prosthetic is, as well as unnecessary, regrettable: it gives ammunition to the ‘identity-based’ casting lobby – in this case, the only-Jewish-actors-should-play-Jewish-characters school of thought. When you watch the two-minute trailer for the film it’s hard to take your eyes off the enlarged hooter. When you see the whole thing (129 minutes), it’s a different matter. This isn’t just because you get used to the way Cooper looks. His portrait of Bernstein is so compelling in other ways that his face soon fits entirely. By getting inside his character’s head, Cooper somehow absorbs his false nose.
It’s not unusual for a biopic nowadays to focus on a short part of the protagonist’s life, seemingly in the belief that this, in combination with a few flashbacks, is enough to disclose all the essential truths of their personality. (A few recent examples: Judy (2019), Mank (2020), Tove (2020), Spencer (2021).) Maestro’s screenplay, by Bradley Cooper and Josh Singer, takes a somewhat different approach. Cooper portrays Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) in his twenties through to his sixties, with a fair amount of screen time given to each decade. The film starts and ends with the elderly Bernstein, at his piano, being interviewed by a television crew. Between these bookends, the narrative is more or less linear. How much Cooper assumes prior knowledge of his subject’s biography – as composer, conductor, educator and more – is hard to tell but information overload clearly isn’t among his priorities: there are no on-screen signposts of dates and places, for example. The action is scored to Bernstein’s own music but according to its tonal relevance to a sequence rather than in a name-that-tune way. When Bernstein and his wife appear on Ed Murrow’s Person to Person programme on CBS, there’s mention of the ongoing gestation of West Side Story but this is subsidiary to our interest in what the Bernsteins’ on-camera words and attitudes reveal or conceal about their lives off-camera. It’s significant that, in the prologue, the elder statesman Bernstein expresses to his interviewer sadness at the recent loss of his wife because Maestro is centrally a portrait of a marriage.
The likes of Aaron Copeland, Adolph Green, Betty Comden and Jerome Robbins come and go quickly in the film. These (and other) celebrities of mid-twentieth-century American culture, although their names register, feature chiefly as context to the main relationship. Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), a theatre and television actress born in Costa Rica and raised in Chile, meet at a party (in 1946) and take an instant shine to each other. By this point in Maestro, we’ve already seen Leonard with a male lover and obviously attracted to other men; while he’s decidedly heterosocial, we haven’t seen him in bed with a woman. When he and Felicia first sleep together it doesn’t go quite according to plan but neither seems to mind. They marry and have soon had three children. Without dwelling on the details of the couple’s sex life together, Maestro makes clear – delightfully clear – that they adore each other’s company and complementary charisma: his whirling-dervish energy, physical and verbal; her ladylike vivacity. They chatter incessantly and laugh a lot. (They also enjoy their cigarettes: censor certificates for this film will have to warn of not just smoking but chain-smoking scenes.) When they decide to marry – to ‘give it a whirl’ – Felicia’s aware of her husband-to-be’s bisexuality. She knows, or thinks she knows, what she’s in for.
Felicia’s disquiet is conveyed in momentary facial responses – expertly controlled and concealed from others – to Leonard’s flirty interactions with his own sex. She has few words even after catching him in a clinch with a young male party guest at one of the famous gatherings at the Bernsteins’ upper-West Side apartment in New York. But those few words – ‘Fix your hair – you’re getting sloppy’ are incisive and the tone in which they’re spoken conveys a sense of how long Felicia has been making allowances: it’s as if she’s too tired of living with the issue to say more. That changes in a much lengthier exchange that also takes place in the New York apartment, on Thanksgiving Day. The rest of the family is celebrating in an adjoining room when Felicia lets rip at Leonard. At the end of the scene, a larger-than-life Snoopy balloon, part of the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, floats by the window – a ludicrous counterpoint to the seismic discord that has played out on the other side of the glass.
As an actor in other directors’ films, Bradley Cooper has never struck me as egocentric. His first effort behind the camera made me think differently: I liked A Star is Born (2018) but Cooper seemed to showcase himself beyond even the requirements of the melodramatic plot. Maestro isn’t a modest undertaking either. Particularly in its early stages, the film is determined to be artily attention-grabbing. A prime example is Cooper’s account of the events that propelled Leonard Bernstein to fame in November 1943. When Bruno Walter, guest conductor at the New York Philharmonic, went down with flu, twenty-five-year-old Bernstein, only recently appointed the orchestra’s assistant conductor, took the baton for a Carnegie Hall performance – at a few hours’ notice, without any rehearsal and to tremendous, headlines-making acclaim. In Maestro, a ringing telephone rouses Bernstein from the bed he’s sharing; he receives the message about Walter, excitedly beats a hand tattoo on his still slumbering lover’s backside, and embarks on a greased-lightning, visually bravura journey from the sack to the podium. The fast cutting of this is right enough, suggesting the disorienting, crazy speed of the young man’s meteoric rise. The succession of spectacular camera angles is (much) too much. In a sequence where he and Felicia watch a rehearsal for Bernstein’s ballet Fancy Free (the source of On the Town), both are suddenly transported from the auditorium into the performance – Leonard now one of the three sailor-suited male dancers, Felicia confronted by the sensual ecstasy he’s experiencing. This certainly evokes the dream ballets that became all the rage in high-end Hollywood musicals of the early post-war era but also the pretentiousness of those fantasy interludes.
There’s a big difference between A Star is Born and Maestro, though, in Cooper’s treatment of his picture’s female star. To be fair, he had reason to foreground himself in the earlier movie: Lady Gaga had no experience as a lead actress; Cooper was directing his first film but knew his job as a lead actor. It was only because Lady Gaga gave a terrific performance – thanks in part to his skilful, encouraging direction – that the end product left an impression of Cooper’s promoting himself almost at her expense. This time around, he has no doubt about his co-star’s calibre. Just as well, because Carey Mulligan’s work in Maestro proves, beyond question, that she’s a world-class actress. There’s self-interest, of course, in a director’s exploiting a superlative performance for all it’s worth; even so, Cooper shows generosity to Mulligan, giving her several solo opportunities to stun. After Felicia and Leonard have separated, she lunches with his sister, Shirley (Sarah Silverstein) – the closest thing Felicia has to a confidante. She describes her eager anticipation of going on a date with a new man, who soon made clear he was hoping Felicia could effect an introduction to a potential boyfriend. Cooper keeps the camera on Mulligan’s face throughout this monologue: the contrast between Felicia’s game, smiling good humour (‘It seems I’m attracted to a certain type!’) and desolate eyes is piercing – especially because of the animation in those eyes in numerous previous scenes. A more prolonged highlight, also strengthened by Mulligan’s earlier joie de vivre, comes in the sequences of Felicia’s final illness and death. These might be thought a gift to any actor worth their salt but I’ve rarely seen such painfully credible physical detail as when Felicia, trying still to be socially gracious, keeps coughing stuff up and disposing of it, as discreetly as she can, in neatly folded pieces of toilet tissue.
Other outstanding passages in Maestro are two-handers for its stars. The Thanksgiving Day domestic takes its place among the all-time-great marital rows on screen. The showdown is startling because it’s the normally composed Felicia who vents her fury and her volatile husband who’s determined to stay quietly calm and reasonable. The complex momentum that results makes the exchange thrilling as well as gruelling to watch. Felicia wins the argument; eventually, Leonard is more than quiet – he has literally no answer to her justified accusations. I know plenty of actors before Bradley Cooper have directed themselves but scenes like this made me wonder as never before at the miracle of doing it well. The descriptions of Felicia’s cancer diagnosis and decline, when she and Leonard are back together, are differently impressive. When a doctor delivers the grim news and sets out what might happen next, it’s Leonard who assents instantly to the radical surgery proposed – before the patient has time to collect herself to make her own reply. His intervention strikes a fine balance: he wants to take care of things for his wife, can’t help expressing his congenital single-mindedness to do what he wants. Shortly before her death, the couple and their three children, now in their twenties (Maya Hawke, Sam Nivola and Alexa Swinton), recall happy memories by putting on the record player a family favourite – Shirley Ellis’s ‘The Clapping Song’. I’ve a pretty strong resistance to group hugs, even as an observer, but the one that concludes this sequence is very effective. It’s the paterfamilias, needless to say, who orchestrates it.
Cooper doesn’t stint on knockout solos for himself either. It helps that Leonard Bernstein was a notoriously, fearlessly theatrical conductor but Cooper’s giving his all fuses with that quality to extraordinary effect in the extended coverage of a performance of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony in Ely Cathedral (where the scene was actually shot). This occurs at a point in the narrative when, as far as the viewer knows, the Bernsteins are no longer a couple. The camera moves between the conductor and others in the cathedral – orchestra, choir, soloists, audience and, just before the music ends, one other spectator: Felicia, in a rear-view shot. As the applause begins, Bernstein runs straight over to his wife and hugs her tight. He’s drenched in sweat and exhilarated; the exhilaration is, for Felicia, contagious. The moment brilliantly encapsulates how joyously irresistible Leonard can be. It also makes emotional sense of the Bernsteins’ reconciliation, which is taken as read in scenes that follow, even though it hasn’t been otherwise explained.
That is pretty typical of how Maestro works, and a big reason why it works so well. There’s a great deal of smart, often overlapping dialogue – in a story dominated by smart, fast-talking people – but Cooper and Josh Singer mostly resist wordy explanations of Leonard Bernstein’s creative qualities and choices: instead, Cooper communicates the force of Bernstein’s personality and his virtual addiction to music through his incarnation of the man and the restless rhythm of his film. It makes sense, too, to blur the line between Bernstein’s genius and his egotism and there’s an intelligently nuanced attitude towards his sexuality. The film makes plain that what’s natural to Leonard is painful to his wife – not least because Felicia is forced to recognise that she’s more anxious than he is to keep it secret. At the same time, Cooper doesn’t overstress the difficulty of being gay and in the public eye in the middle of last century; he implies that it was, if anything, relatively less difficult for a powerful figure moving in artistic circles.
In the Maestro trailer, Carey Mulligan’s name appears before Bradley Cooper’s. Does giving Felicia pride of place detract from the film as the Leonard Bernstein story? I don’t think so, although it definitely makes for an unexpected balance of power between the two principals. Cooper explores and illuminates Bernstein by showing the effects of who he was on the person closest to him. The message may be in the title: it’s almost refreshing that this film isn’t ‘Bernstein’ and apt that it’s Maestro. As Shirley Bernstein reminds Felicia, ‘There’s a price for being in my brother’s orbit – you know that’. Felicia spectating in Ely Cathedral is the culmination of a series of images of her as onlooker – in the wings of a theatre stage or at a party. She has to deal with satellite status in her husband’s sex life and in relation to his star power. The Thanksgiving showdown derives a lot of its force from the convergence of those two elements: Felicia excoriates Leonard for the combination of his egocentric demands and what she insists is his underlying self-loathing: ‘Your truth makes you brave and strong and saps the rest of us of any kind of bravery or strength. Because it’s so draining, Lenny, it’s so fucking draining to love and accept someone who doesn’t love and accept themselves’[1].
The film’s last shot is of Felicia’s face – of Leonard remembering Felicia’s face. Then the closing credits begin and footage of the actual Bernstein arrives on screen. For once, this isn’t a letdown – for two reasons. The first is obvious: more than thirty years after his death, Bernstein remains a well-known face; many in the audience will have that face in mind even as they watch Bradley Cooper’s version of him; the result of the real thing finally usurping the actor is therefore less jarring than usual. The second reason is more subtle. Seeing Bernstein on library film – seeing someone not the same as the man on screen throughout the preceding two hours – seems somehow to acknowledge that a dramatisation of his life can only partly get to grips with him. That’s no doubt true of biopics generally. In this case, though, it chimes interestingly with the film’s style – the strong impression it gives of showing us ‘scenes from the life of …’ – as well as with the quasi-double life that Bernstein led.
Like another of 2023’s big pictures, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Maestro alternates between black-and-white and colour cinematography. As noted above, Cooper’s film is sometimes visually bombastic but this alternation isn’t (unlike Oppenheimer‘s) pretentiously confusing. The black-and-white sequences are for the 1940s and 1950s, the colour sequences for the 1960s onwards. This corresponds to collective memory of how things appeared on screen at those times. It also links monochrome to youth, even innocence, and colour to ageing, and corruption. In both modes, Matthew Libatique’s lighting and the work of the large make-up team are exceptional. Bradley Cooper, who’s forty-eight, ages from mid-twenties to sixty plus and Carey Mulligan, who’s thirty-eight, from mid-twenties to mid-fifties. They both always look the right age. The make-up of the older Bernstein is more remarkable for the texture and mottling of his skin than for his prosthetic nose.
Bradley Cooper didn’t attend this British premiere screening of Maestro at the London Film Festival – probably why Festival director Kristy Matheson saw fit to refer to the film’s producer, director, co-writer and star as simply ‘Cooper’ throughout her introduction. (There seemed no reason other than ignorance for her persistent mispronunciation of the name of the film’s subject: the VIP guests she welcomed to the stage of the Royal Festival Hall included Leonard Bernstein’s daughters, one of whom actually said her father’s name aloud, yet Matheson kept calling him ‘Burn-steen’ rather than ‘Burn-styne’.) Just twenty-four hours on from her hyperbolic praise of Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, Matheson struck a different note for Maestro. I got the feeling she wasn’t very keen on either of the leading men, Bradley or Leonard. Judging from some of the film’s early reviews, it seems Kristy Matheson isn’t alone in this view, certainly about Bradley: several critics have deplored his grandiosity. Maestro isn’t Citizen Kane but some of the animus towards Cooper may well be, like the hostility shown Orson Welles in 1941, an expression of irritation with multi-talentedness. Except for sounding a bit too adenoidal as the older Bernstein, Cooper’s acting is just about impeccable. It’s true that his film-making radiates a persistent sense of dynamic showing off but this is so redolent of similar qualities in Leonard Bernstein – and the best parts of Maestro are so good – that the result is exciting cinema.
9 October 2023
[1] Afternote: Watching Maestro a second time, with subtitles (on Netflix), was a mixed blessing. It was good to pick up on a few lines I’d missed in the cinema. A couple of times, though, I rather regretted hearing what was said. For example, at the end of the Mahler in Ely Cathedral, as the Bernsteins embrace, he asks why she came and she replies, ‘There’s no hate in your heart’ – which was just what she accused him of in her Thanksgiving tirade: ‘Hate in your heart, and anger – for so many things, it’s hard to count – that’s what drives you. … You aren’t up on that podium allowing us all to experience the music the way it was intended. You are throwing it in our faces’. Of course, Felicia is caught up in the euphoria of the moment in the Cathedral; even so, the explicit renunciation of her earlier words rings false.