Gavin Richardson

MAESTRO This review is generally spoiler free I stopped this film about an hour in, planning to finish it later. At the halfway mark, I thought I was seeing something fairly conventional. It’s no spoiler to say that much of Bradley Cooper’s film deals with the tension between Leonard Bernstein’s public and private life. As revealed in the opening scenes, Bernstein is bisexual. Amid dalliances with men, he meets the Chilean-born actress Felicia Montealegre and falls in love. Felicia is not naïve about Bernstein‘s attraction to men, and much of the film is taken up with the contours of their unconventional marriage. MAESTRO thus has much in common with 2018’s BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY: a musical genius has a loving relationship with a woman but is inexorably drawn to men, creating tensions among his public persona and fraught private realities. But Felicia seems so accepting of Bernstein’s sexuality that at the midway point I wondered where the conflict would be in this film. I’m pleased to say that the second half of the film was richer and more nuanced. This Leonard Bernstein biopic found its footing when the film ceased to be about Bernstein, or at least when it became more about Felicia. Her story carries the second half of the film and gives viewers something more unpredictable to process. Carey Mulligan should be nominated for Best Actress or Supporting Actress. The additional supporting cast is strong; for my money, a real revelation is the comedian Sarah Silverman as Bernstein’s sister Shirley. I could’ve seen more of her. One thing the film really nails is the rapid-fire, stilted conversational language of East Coast Intelligentsia in the 1940s and 1950s. A drawback is that this dialogue is sometimes hard to follow. An additional complicating factor is the way Bradley Cooper alters his voice to approximate Bernstein’s, dropping pitch and articulating everything in velar fashion from the back of the mouth. Viewers may wish to turn on subtitles if the dialogue is a challenge. As far as makeup and prosthetics go, most of the time, they work. Occasionally Cooper looks like he’s been shot through an Instagram filter, but the makeup looks better as he ages. Late in the film there were moments when I really thought I was looking at Leonard Bernstein, particularly in a scene in which he conducts Mahler’s RESURRECTION SYMPHONY in Ely Cathedral. If Cooper is nominated for an Oscar, and he probably will be, it will be for this single-shot scene in which he doesn’t speak a word. It is as engrossing a six minutes in film as I’ve ever seen. In addition to Ely Cathedral, perhaps the most affecting scene occurs between Bernstein and his teenage daughter Jamie, played by Maya Hawke. She’s heard rumors about her father. When Bernstein lies to her and insists that the salacious rumors are not true, she’s visibly relieved. Bradley Cooper’s complicated anguish at the fact of her relief is a genuinely moving moment in the film. One matter this biopic skirts is the sexual predation that classical music impresarios have practiced virtually unchecked until recent years. 2022’s TÁR took on this matter directly, yet MAESTRO never really prompts us to be critical of Bernstein’s affairs outside of the domestic sphere. Perhaps there’s only so much a film can do. But to me, it seemed an odd blind spot given the obvious power disparities that would obtain between Bernstein and his charges. I give MAESTRO 3.5 stars out of 5.