Maestro
Bradley Cooper demands his Oscar in this awards-bait drivel.
Carey Mulligan and Bradley Cooper as Felicia and Leonard Bernstein in Cooper's Maestro.
Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) is already a celebrated conductor on the rise when he meets actress Felicia (Carey Mulligan). Though there’s an undeniable spark from the start, the partnership between Leonard and Felicia isn’t as perfect as the outside world believes it to be. Leonard has a wandering eye and an undeniable talent, which leaves Felicia often in the shadows, trying to keep their family together.
Can the duo reach a compromise on how they live their lives or will Lenny’s ego and appetites get in the way?
Since the first time Bradley Cooper warbled “Shallow” with Lady Gaga, he’s been on an Oscar hunt. When a sincere, character-driven drama didn’t get him his trophy, he switched gears. That’s right, Cooper “pulled a LA LA Land” —and just like Damien Chazelle’s worst film, Maestro is every Oscar-bait trope Cooper could dream of crammed into a blender and dumped onto the screen. The script is trite biopic nonsense, the performances range from blank to overpowering, and the movie itself feels both interminable and shallow.
The problems begin and end with co-writer/director/star Cooper, who seems so determined to prove his talent in front of and behind the camera that he’s created a jumbled mess of a film with lots of cool technical specs and absolutely no heart. The film falls into the typical biopic trap: Trying to cram a lifetime into a two-hour running time. More successful biopics like Netflix’s other awards contender Rustin wisely chose to focus on a finite period in the subject’s life, developing a story and character instead of speed-running through history. Leonard Bernstein was a towering musical figure in his day, with a complex personal and public life. But in Cooper’s hands, Bernstein is the most annoying guy at every party — you know the one: He tops your stories no matter what you’re talking about, he throws out one-liners even when they make no sense, and just generally acts like he’s in a one-man show instead of interacting with humans.
This portrayal undermines some of the more interesting parts of Bernstein. Why bother examining how transgressive On the Town was when it premiered (it featured both Black and Japanese actors in 1944 America, and a Black conductor took over the production during its first year) when we can use it as an excuse for Cooper to don a sailor costume and dance? Why discuss the myriad political causes that influenced Bernstein’s work when we can have another shot of Mulligan looking morose in a corner?
The cardinal sin of the movie, however, is that it never really explains Bernstein’s process. There is something deeply satisfying about watching an expert show off their mastery of a particular skill. But instead of seeing how Bernstein’s conducting transformed classical music, or how he composed West Side Story, we’re stuck in a parlor drama about Leonard and his wife’s fraught marriage. What makes Bernstein a “maestro”? His accomplishments are mentioned, but what makes him singular is never explored. The best sequence in the movie is Bernstein conducting Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony in one long take. It’s the closest we come to seeing the passion and brilliance of Bernstein, but this movie is more interested in cigarette smoke and resentful looks at cocktail parties than it is in musical genius.
As for Leonard’s other half, it seems a shame she never ran into Linda Porter, as they both chose to marry musical geniuses who happened to enjoy affairs with men. As it is, Maestro is essentially a version of DeLovely (Kevin Kline’s Cole Porter biopic), but devoid of the music, whimsy, or interest.
Felicia Bernstein is portrayed as a suffering wife. Sure, she works, but her main function in Maestro is to look vaguely unhappy as Cooper runs circles around her with the type of manic energy that would make him the most exhausting kid at theater camp. Mulligan, who has convinced a generation of film critics that flat affectation is excellent acting, seems lost as Felicia. She plays Felicia like someone who heard second-hand stories of Katherine Hepburn and was asked to imitate her. It’s a lot of odd Transatlantic accent work and blank stares into the middle distance.
That’s not to say that all of Maestro is terrible, only most of it. Cooper set out an ambitious artistic challenge for himself, changing the style of the movie to reflect time passing. The 40s are lush black-and-white shots with heavy shadows and creamy closeups. The 70s are grainy color film and more natural acting. It’s a bold choice to have the cinematic language evolve with the passage of time in the movie, and it largely works. Cinematographer Matthew Libatique gamely pieces together impressive tracking shots and whip pans to make the film feel fancy and carefully monitors the milieu of each scene to keep it period-appropriate. There are some especially beautiful black-and-white moments in the early section of the film that are reminiscent of the usage of shadow in The Third Man. Unfortunately, Mulligan and Cooper are not really up for the lickety-split patter of the 40s section, making their interactions almost painful. Thankfully, they settle into a better dynamic as the film evolves.
If you’re a fan of Bernstein’s work, Maestro will offer you nothing new. If you’ve never heard of him before, you’d be forgiven for thinking Leonard Bernstein was an obnoxious cog in Bradley Cooper’s Oscar machine.
Verdict: It’s terrible, it’ll probably win 4 Oscars.
Maestro is rated R and available on Netflix.
