Film Review: "Maestro"

Bradley Cooper's sophomore effort has a reach that far too often exceeds its grasp in a biopic that ultimately isn't particularly revealing about its subject.

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It will probably come as no surprise to you, dear reader, that I am a huge fan of the biopic. As someone who has long had an interest and a passion for films and TV shows that engage with history and the past, I’ve always been drawn to those films which use a feature film runtime to explore some aspect of a famous figure’s life. The very best examples of the genre are those that really help us to understand some particularly important aspect of a major historical figure, whether in their public or their private life. 

Thus, I was very much looking forward to Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, which takes a sweeping view of the life of Leonard Bernstein (played by Bradley Cooper), focusing in particular on his vexed marriage to Carey Mulligan’s Felicia Montealegre. The years go by and Bernstein becomes ever more successful in the world of American music, even as he also struggles to attain the sense of artistic honesty he yearns for. At the same time, his flagrant affairs with a number of men place a powerful strain on his marriage, though Leonard and Bernstein do achieve a reconciliation of sorts after her terminal cancer diagnosis. 

 I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I didn’t like the film at all. It certainly has its high points–its aesthetic is pretentious yet compelling, Cooper is charismatic (though his performance is uneven), and Carey Mulligan is simply divine as Felicia–but these unfortunately don’t add up to a convincing psychological portraits of one of the most significant and influential musical figures of the 20th century. When, at the end, Bernstein asks his interviewer whether there are any questions, the answer can’t help but be: yes, actually, quite a few. 

To be honest, it’s rather hard to judge Cooper’s performance, given the dust-up over his use of a prosthetic nose to more perfectly capture Bernstein’s physical appearance. It is a distracting affectation, to be sure, and it causes Cooper’s voice to sound distorted (to my ear, at least). Moreover, Copper is often so broad in his characterizations that he threatens to slide into caricature. There are moments when one can see a more fully-fleshed out character emerging from the frantic caricature, but far too often the distraction of the nose and Cooper’s own physiognomy (particularly his radiant smile and his piercing eyes) disrupt the sort of suspension of disbelief necessary to really buy him as Bernstein. 

Carey Mulligan, on the other hand, delivers one of the performances of her career as Felicia. Mulligan gives a woman who was clearly smitten by the radiantly charming Bernstein, even as she also struggled with his increasing stardom and, more importantly, his increasingly visible love affairs with other men. During one particularly pivotal scene she shoots Bernstein a glare as he holds hands with one of his paramour's during a concert. Without a single word Mulligan conveys a woman whose love has begun to curdle into something darker even if, as she says in a subsequent scene, she can’t help but be in love with him. Like seemingly everyone else she can’t pull away from his orbit–though this doesn’t keep her from bitingly telling him that he’s going to end up a lonely old queen–and this, along with her cancer diagnosis, is her great tragedy. As the disease slowly claims her life, Felicia becomes ever frailer, even as she holds onto her dignity and her stubborn independence. It’s heartbreaking…and brilliant. 

Visually the film is a feast for the eyes. The segments set in the 1940s are shot in black-in-white and in the Academy ratio, clearly in an effort to mimic the films of the period (there’s also something screwball comedy-like about all of the pattering dialogue and the frantic pacing of the story). As it goes along, however, the style changes: the screen is saturated with rich color, the ratio expands to widescreen. Arguably this choice is meant to make the film self-consciously cinematic, but I found it all to be rather boringly pretentious. A little pretension is fine so long as there’s a good story. Last year’s Tár, for example, was as pretentious as they come, but there was still a compelling story at its heart, and Blachett’s performance was instantly unforgettable. 

When it comes down to it, all the technical wizardry isn’t enough to overcome a rather lackluster script. The goal of a biopic–in my opinion, at least–is that it should use a particular moment in a subject’s life to shed light on the whole. This was something that Hollywood did particularly effectively in the 1930s, arguably the pinnacle of the genre, but it’s something too many writers have forgotten how to do. Maestro, like far too many biopics of late–including last year’s I Wanna Dance with Somebody–tries to take on too much of the artist’s life and thus ends up not being particularly illuminating. Having seen the film I’m not sure just what it’s trying to say about Bernstein as either an artist or a man, because neither aspect of his persona is really given enough dramatic heft to really land. Cooper’s sometimes cartoonish performance certainly doesn’t help.

To be fair, Maestro does deserve credit for not shying away from Bernstein’s well-known affairs with numerous men. Here, too, though, there’s a shallowness to the story that robs it of the impact it’s clearly aiming for. We get to see several of Bernstein’s lovers, but few of them are painted with anything other than superficial depth. The one exception to this is David Oppenheim–played by Matt Bomer, who makes the most out of the little he is given–but even here there’s not enough detail to the relationship to make its eventual dissolution feel anything other than perfunctory. Bernstein’s other long-term male paramour is sketched as to be hardly worth mentioning.  As Jamie Taberrer so aptly puts it, it should have been queerer.

In the end, I don’t think that Maestro will go down as one of the canonical biopics. It’s too shallow and too scattered and too wrapped up in its own pretension. As Taberrer also noted, Cooper’s Bernstein is some sort of strange and overwrought amalgam of Lydia Tar and Liberace, and the results are remarkably anodyne for a production that leans so heavily into its own too-muchness. Other than one revealing interview, we don’t really get much of a sense of Bernstein’s inner life, and this is a shame. There are glimpses here and there of a better, richer, deeper film, but they just make us that much more dissatisfied and underwhelmed by what we’ve been given.