A Review Of "Maestro"

As Watched On My Couch Via Netflix Last Night

Leonard Bernstein Unfiltered

“Maestro” opens with a shot tightening in on Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein. The great conductor/composer/popularizer of music is playing piano while a film crew records. The coloration is of a slightly different saturation than is common in modern film. Cooper has made the artistic decision to pair the film stock of each scene to the era being depicted. As far as the face we’re considering? For a brief second the prosthetics used to turn a modern Italian/Irish movie star into a mid century musician of Semitic extraction is a bit on the nose if you will, but soon becomes a seamless part of Cooper’s overall performance. Bernstein sobs and speaks of a woman he once loved, as the film crew dutifully records.

Huh. Do they hire an actor of play that scenes’ sound guy and cameraman, or just use “Maestro’s” actual sound guy and camera man to play the sound guy and camera man? If so who records this scene? Is that what the second unit is for?

Next, we are thrust into black-and-white as a younger Bernstein awakens to the news that he is to fill in as conductor of the New York Philharmonic. Bernstein throws open the curtains of his dark sleeping quarters as his lover, his male lover, lays in bed. This is David Oppenheim, played by Matt Bomer, an actor who is so good-looking that whatever film or TV show he’s in usually features a line of dialogue directly addressing his handsomeness. So Bernstein was gay, but also loved his wife. Huh, I wonder if this will be explored much in this movie.

Meanwhile, the main IMDB page of “Maestro” does that annoying thing where it lists the actors in order of appearance, so we see a prominent photo of “Claudio’s Guest #2” but no word on the actors who played much bigger roles like Bernstein’s children, lovers, or collaborators. Annoying.

Soon, we’re at a black-and-white 1950’s party, which must have appeared to the participants at the time to have been in color. Guests in a suburban home raucously sing around a piano. When this happened a few months ago in Oppenheimer, I was just as charmed. I want to attend 50’s parties where someone plays the piano and we all sing. During the party in this movie, we meet Carey Mulligan as Felicia. She and Bernstein exit the party, which was, judging by the housing stock, probably taking place in Forrest Hills or Riverdale. They leave and RIGHT THERE, is a city bus. On a semi-suburban cul-de-sac. Maybe the mass transit schedules back then were adhered to so precisely that such a perfect timing could be planned for. Oh, look at that, IMDB says

Matt Bomer is often said to bear a strong physical resemblance to British actor Henry Cavill. At one time, both were set to portray Superman before the role was recast. Both got to essay the role years later, in the same year, Cavill in Man of Steel (2013) and Bomer in Superman: Unbound (2013).

This is a stupid point, because Superman: Unbound was an animated movie so Bomer’s physical resemblance to anyone is irrelevant, except insofar as it implicates the lack of creativity among casting directors in animated films. You know who would make a great animated film Superman? Bill Camp. He’s a great actor, has a sonorous voice, and great vocal range. And the fact that he looks nothing like Superman is entirely beside the point in an animated film.

Actor Bill Camp, who is not in “Maestro”, and doesn’t look like Superman

Bernstein and Felicia find themselves in a darkened off-Broadway theater, where the lights, when switched on make that THUNKUHHHHbzzzzz sound. I’ve turned on lots of lights, but have never heard that sound. They’re briefly interrupted by “Joseph the Janitor”, as portrayed by William Hill, an actor who, I discover, has played 11 different parts in the Law and Order universe.

Bernstein and Felicia are courting, get married, have kids, and are interviewed by, I think, Edward R. Murrow. Bernstein visits a production of the musical he’s written, On the Town where he is is sucked into what seems to be a dream ballet version of the show. We do not glimpse Bernstein composing the music for the show, thinking about the music for the show, or revising the music for the show. We do see him as a dancing sailor, which seems unlikely to have actually happened.

Instead of the creative process, or scenes of musical inspiration (hard to depict compellingly) we get in “Maestro” many scenes of the main couple smoking, coupling, decoupling and re-coupling. It’s a couple too many de and re-couples. It is during this period that I begin excavating IMDB-inspired fun facts.

In interviews Bradley Cooper has said he wasn’t that familiar with Mahler but as a child he pretended to conduct. Checks out. Wow Bradley Cooper’s IMBD page is dominated by Guardians of the Galaxy stuff. Since 2017 he’s credited as acting in 14 movies. Eight have been as Rocket Raccoon from Guardians. The first entry listed, ie his most recent film on IMDB isn’t “Maestro”, it’s “I am Groot" whose title character is the lumbering tree-like humanoid who can only ever utter the phrase that gives the series it’s title.

To be defined for playing a truculent space raccoon, and not for directing a story of American musical genius is enough to make me feel a pang of sympathy toward Bradley Cooper. Or rather, it would be, had Bradley Cooper decided to make a movie about Leonard Bernstein, American musical genius. Instead he has made a movie about Leonard Bernstein, bisexual. There are also major themes of Leonard Bernstein, infuriating husband, Leonard Bernstein, extrovert, and Leonard Bernstein, cigarette smoker. Leonard Bernstein was all of those things, but without the music he’s not special. He’s not Leonard Bernstein, the guy who wrote West Side Story, or in this movie, the guy who says some dialogue to his unhappy wife while the score of West Side Story plays in the background.

At his point I have mostly disengaged from the movie as experience, and begin to treat it as artifact to be observed. There are two screens vying for my attention, and the little one in my hand is providing me more interesting material than the one over the mantle.

We Live in a Locked Landscape

I’ve heard that Netflix has a 1.5x speed feature, but its apparently only available on your phone. The Google search results for 1.5 speed are infuriatingly unclear on the phone-only point. The Google search about eliminating the landscape lock from your iphone was much better. What percent of the time does someone WANT to lock in landscape versus having unknowingly touched a series of keys resulting in having a locked landscape thrust upon the them? 80% ? 90%?

Cool scene with a giant Snoopy. Now that must have cost quite a bit in licensing fees, making the Charles Schultz estate one of the few parties to emerge from “Maestro” better off than they went in. But I wonder. What if you’re filming a documentary in New York on Thanksgiving, and a giant intellectually-protected balloon floats past your camera, how screwed are you? If at the exact moment your documentary subject confronts his abusive step-father, or achieves rapprochement with a former bandmate and BOOM Kermit floats by, do you just have to scrap the footage?

Lighter than Air Intellectual Property

Anyway, Sarah Silverman is pretty great as Bernstein’s sister. Forgot to mention that. Also, isn’t Groot really just an arboreal Grape Ape? Something to consider as the 70’s spool out before us, replete with cravats and blue jeans certainly referred to at the time as “dungarees”. It can move no faster than 1.0x speed.

Grape Aoe, circa Hannah Barbera’s “Not even Trying” Era

Over on IMDB a reviewer references an Amy Schumer joke about the Aaron Sorkin directed film “Lucy and Desi”. Schumer said it was an ”innovation to make a movie about Lucille Ball without even a moment that’s funny.” She added “It’s like making a biopic about Michael Jordan and just showing the bus trips between games.”

But just as I think Cooper is about to depict his version of the trip from the Delta Center to the Park City Marriott, he wows us. A six minute single take of Bernstein conducting Mahler's Second Symphony in England’s Ely Cathedral. It is so intense that when Cooper descends from the conductor’s podium and melts into the arms of Felicia, who whispers something to him, the viewer, even after enduring all of non-musical smoking, flirting, cravat-wearing and brooding is driven to perform the action of the truly invested Netflix subscriber. I go back and turn on subtitles to figure out the dialogue. Here’s a handy guide:

Click the main button on your remote, not the three parallel lines in the circle, because who ever designed the remote understands that three parallel lines could never be interpreted as “menu” but the middle circle button would. Navigate to subtitles, and resist the urge to hit the reverse arrow, else you flirt with the potentially disastrous option of “play from the beginning.” If you have done all this correctly, you will be able to see that the key line of dialogue at the emotional apex of the film is:

“There is no hate in your heart.”

Felicia forgives him, or realizes he was always the man he was. A master of music. A maestro if you will. From Felicia’s perspective at first she would, then she wouldn’t, but from this point forward she will. And then

she gets cancer and dies.

𝄞 The Big Finale 🎵

Once I realized that Bradley Cooper was uninterested in making a Leonard Bernstein movie about music I began pondering what he was interested in. I also, while pondering, worked out that the day’s Worldle was “Phone”, not “Stone” or ”Prone”. I decided that Cooper must have wanted to make a movie like Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage or Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story. But Cooper’s insight was to make the husband not just a professor, or theater director or any old schlub, but to make him Leonard Bernstein. That’d be interesting. Maybe this could start a genre where we learn about Neil Armstrong’s interests aside from outer space. Or Cooper could do an entire film about the relationship between Marie and Pierre Curie, without the parts about radium or laboratories. That one ends in cancer too, by the way.

I figure Cooper saw Oppenheimer, an historic movie with some parts in color and an English actresses playing the non-English wife of a libidinous man, and said, “I can do that!” But all the parts about atomic energy bored him. He also didn’t like the parts with Albert Einstein, or Robert Downey’s Lewis Strauss, or perhaps the entire idea of an antagonist. So he eliminated them, but added more cigarettes.

Then I realized, Cooper did something much more profound than any of this. Apparently it took him six years to master that one scene in Ely Cathedral. He dug deep into Bernstein’s psyche and motivations and reflected them on the screen. He is, throughout “Maestro” echoing Bernstein’s complaint of, “the diminution of creativity, which has come to a grinding halt”. And lest we, the viewer find transcendence or even enjoyment in the towering art that Bernstein made, Cooper throws at us obstacles, disrupting any connection to the art. Oh, Cooper’s subtle. He doesn’t make a movie that seems inept, or less than a great try by a director who really, truly does want to be nominated for an Oscar, but it’s clear that Bradley Cooper was dead set on making a specific statement about the transformative power of art, that statement being “It is powerless.” In the face of prosthetics, fealty to source material, distractions from phones, the promise of boredom-abating menu options of streaming services, and the pressure on the artist to differentiate himself from what came before, transcendence can’t be done. Scenes can be scrumptious, costuming choices from crazy cravats and Evel Knievel-type jumpsuits can perfectly evoke an era while retaining their repulsiveness, and the acting can be pristine. Really, truly wonderfully impassioned. But art? Art that transports, that obliterated the quotidian concerns of your current circumstance? Impossible. Maybe even pointless. We are all just humans who are fated to frustrate the people we’re closest to. Even the giants among us, who are are so interesting as to inspire award-enticing biopics of their lives, can’t be sure the audience will pay attention, or that the obsessive auteurs who sweated our stories into being will ultimately bother to include the good parts.