Actor/director Bradley Cooper delivers a stunning biopic of the great American composer/director Leonard Bernstein in Maestro. Although a large part of the audience knows Bernstein for composing West Side Story and On the Town, less for Candide, and even less for conducting Mahler’s Second Symphony, it is the last on the list that he would want to be remembered for. Lamentably, Lenny would have liked to be remembered like Mahler, a great composer; whereas he feels he is just a brilliant conductor with a gift for pop operas.
In the scene of Mahler’s Second, Cooper directs the orchestra at a cathedral as if it were the Second Coming, or at least one of the most stirring orchestral performances of the century. Like the film itself, Cooper directs with meticulous care Bernstein’s vision of artistic freedom, unshackled by societal demands. Juxtaposing this transcendent interpretation with the contradictory marriage that almost controls him gives the drama a richness of complexity to show him as human and godlike at once.
Marrying Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) best expresses his desire to live in whatever worlds he wanted, for not only did he love her deeply, he also was a homosexual who may have needed the cover a wife and children would give him. Being gay was still against the law, you see. More than that, Lenny was his own man given to a hedonist’s delights and an artist’s catholicity.
As for Cooper’s fake nose, think not a bit about it, for it fits his good looks and helps us see better the Lenny no one could ever imitate, even Bradley Cooper. Cooper, along with the outstanding Carey Mulligan, deserves all the best actor accolades society can bestow.
Mulligan comes close to underplaying the torment the marital arrangement brought although she knew what she was getting into. You might have guessed this biopic is not really about Bernstein’s musical genius and more about conducting a personal life as free of the bounds life in mid-century NYC would allow.
Relive the glorious contradictions of Leonard Bernstein’s rich life now on Netflix.
Maestro
Director: Bradley Cooper (A Star is Born)
Screenplay: Cooper, Josh Singer (Spotlight)
Cast: Carey Mulligan (Suffragette), Cooper
Run Time: 2h 9m
Rating: R
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and hosts Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take out of WCBE 90.5 FM. Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com
