MAESTRO (2023)
In Maestro, and in the life of Leonard Bernstein, Bradley Cooper finds his opus. An effervescent orchestration of style, mood and era, the film is as much a biography of Bernstein as it is a cinematic mix tape of styles and tones of the middle decades of the twentieth century. What begins as a fast-talking New York picture about two twenty-somethings attacking their careers in the performing arts head on, slowly melts away into a solitary and existential drift through life, death and the pursuit of creation. Bernstein sits, chain smoking as always, in a casual interview being recorded by an author in. the late 1960’s, remarking at his societal malaise, feeling like everything around him is somehow heading for disaster or degradation. What starts out with all the knockout energy and triple-decker dialogue of a Hawks or Sturges screwball comedy slowly evolves before our eyes into a sorrowful dirge for the beloved in our life, the pain of our unions with our pursuits and the people around us, our devotion to the field we’ve found success in. The young artist creates because he’s bursting at the seams, the elder artist finds vitality in the ritual. Cooper highlights the schizophrenia, as Bernstein puts it, in another interview for television in the 50’s, of the artist who works alone, crafting and composing in a completely introverted private world, only to turn around and become a performer, an extrovert of the highest order, becoming a spectacular image of oneself on an elevated stage before the crowd. Cooper’s direction floats us above the fray, never becoming heavy, indulging in each time period for brief observational snapshots, observing rather than analyzing and the film is better for it.
Art and artists look for freedom and expression at all costs, ignoring the self-destruction and following the impulses that guide them along. When pressed about any of this, Bernstein simply dances over top of the questioning, his words become a jazz of half-thought notions and fleeting appeals toward the logic of the listener, yet there is no logic when it comes to the visceral act of life. The film’s sparse action sequences of a dance number and the scenes of Bernstein conducting are few but the specter of Bernstein’s music is layered wall-to-wall in swells of orchestral throughout. The character of Bernstein rarely speaks deeply outside of the interview sequences and instead dances throughout the crowd with aloof flirtation toward party guests, friends and lovers. The inner struggle of the artist at work is only hinted at, the deep feeling toward his compatriots is laughed and shrugged away as easily as his ambivalence toward his own achievements. The complexity is never on display, though seen in glimpses of his difficulty communicating his inner life to his children, a cocaine-fueled phone call to his daughter and so on. Mulligan as Felicia Montealegre is somehow more in tune with his feelings than he is, putting into words that which Leonard cannot. The irony of Montealegre’s orchestration of their personal lives is not lost in any encounter. Both performers, Mulligan as the actress, director, mother and matriarch, Cooper as the composer, conductor and father, playing the child when it suits him, making light of a Snoopy doll on the day of Manhattan’s Thanksgiving parade as Mulligan confronts him over the inadequacies of their marriage and partnership. Bernstein, never refusing an impulse be it creative or otherwise, taking a lover as and when he chooses with an innocence that belies its destructive power. Montealegre’s only reproach toward this is to chastise him for becoming ‘sloppy’ with indiscretion, never for infidelity, and Bernstein genuinely displays a detached perplexity that any of this would get under her skin. Her role as wife becomes that of accomplice and confidant toward his affairs. The victory of our maestro here, Cooper as director, is to play it all before an unflinching camera, rarely cutting from Bernstein or Montealegre in their scenes, as though the other players in the room didn’t matter. Moments are allowed to play out, the camera lingers on the married couple’s Thanksgiving argument long after most directors would cut away. The frenetic interplay of the opening scenes simply dissolves into stark examination.
Montealegre’s death is lingered on, Bernstein’s death is never shown. She bears the suffering of the two, while Bernstein is rarely shown to experience consequence. In a way, our window into the life of the conductor begins when the two meet, and we do not stay long after her passing, only to witness Bernstein in a final display of gratification as the old man instructs a new student and then subsequently begins a new affair in a discotheque. The unwed Bernstein is only seen in brief bookends of this scene and the opening of his first appearance at Carnegie Hall. As the opening quote from Bernstein illuminates, the film looks for the ‘tension between the contradictory answers’ to find its meaning. Ultimately we find an ode to the power of performance to bring the inner to the outer, both in content of Bernstein’s compositions and in form of Mulligan and Cooper’s emotive acts before the camera, giving voice to the thoughts unspoken behind the eyes. The film finds its true climax in the moment just following Bernstein’s performance of Mahler at the Ely Cathedral. In a drained but elated state, to the applause of those gathered, he is reunited with Montealegre, the brief instant of emotional catharsis is all that is needed to see the bond of two which outside eyes can’t comprehend. Cooper has fashioned a steady and relentless drive through a private symphony that only our two leads can really hear.
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