MAESTRO (2023) - Mark Reviews Movies

Maestro, Netflix

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | November 20, 2023

Clearly a passion a project, co-writer/director/star Bradley Cooper has put his all—and a prosthetic nose—into Maestro, a biography of the career of the great American composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein and of his relationship with wife Felicia Montealegre Bernstein. It's arguable that one could come away with less understanding of the man and his work after watching this movie than even the minimum one might have had beforehand.

First and foremost, there's the movie's music, which exists almost entirely from Bernstein's catalogue. It's compelling, obviously, but to what end does Cooper employ it? It often feels like a gimmick, such as a moment that has the musician assembling with friends at his family estate set to the "Prologue" piece from West Side Story (suggesting, perhaps, that a fight is imminent, which it is), or mere background accompaniment to a string of roundabout scenes.

The big moments of the music taking focus, notably an orchestral and choral piece that admirably goes on for a number of minutes, are as much a showpiece for Cooper himself. Waving his arms and putting his whole back into it, the actor possesses and displays undeniable energy in such scenes of performance, and at a certain point in the lengthy church scene, it becomes tempting to believe that Cooper, as a director putting his acting self at center stage, is equally invested in the audience noting all of the sweat pouring from his head and making sure we appreciate the beauty of the music.

This movie is very much a show and, in its understated way, very showy about being such. It feels too controlled, contrived, and, ultimately, fake to believe its depiction of the relationship between Cooper's Leonard and Carey Mulligan's Felicia is in any way revealing about or even descriptive of the figure at its core.

Much of their early bonding is portrayed in a flourish of propelled camera work, cheeky transitions, and dialogue that has the actors speak as if they're in a movie set in New York City of the 1940s, instead of actually living there. As the decades pass and the marriage has its ups and downs, period-appropriate-looking color film techniques highlight a series of scenes that do a lot to bypass whatever depth must have existed in this relationship.

They key element to that is the fact of Leonard's sexuality. In reality, it's likely that Bernstein was bisexual, and that's technically the case in the movie, too. Before meeting Felicia at a party, Leonard has affairs with men, mostly suggested as peers wake up in bed with Leonard or give him loaded looks when he introduces Felicia to them.

Felicia clearly knows this, because—if there's a reason the movie doesn't fail outright in a noteworthy way, beyond some clever experimentation on Cooper's part as a filmmaker—Mulligan's quiet, knowing performance gives us a sense of an actual person here. After they're married, the continuing affairs—only with men in this movie's portrayal, though—become a point of contention for her—mostly because she's worried the couple's children will discover it but partly, apparently, because it hurts her.

We kind of understand Leonard's motive for hiding his sexuality. A lot of it has to do with his desire for fame at a time when such affairs could easily be a public and/or legal scandal, but for him, a big part of it is his domineering father, who appears in exactly one scene and is referenced maybe two or three times otherwise. The script, written by Cooper and Josh Singer, is in such a rush to cover as much of its subject's life as possible that whatever scratches it makes into comprehending the man are basically forgotten a scene or two later.

Again, the two main performances—even Cooper's patently showy one, beneath layers of both cosmetic and aging makeup—do give us a sense of actual people here, putting on a display of contentment at the many, many parties in the story but dealing with secret pain and conflict in the few quiet moments alone. However, the entire framing of the movie, which sees an older Leonard playing piano for a camera crew before openly mourning his wife, forms these characters and this relationship into simple molds.

Felicia loves Leonard dearly, completely, and with near-endless patience for his devotion to his craft and his self-hatred, and he might have been able to appreciate and better feel that affection and commitment, if not for, well, the fact that he's attracted to men. There's a scene late in the movie of an older Leonard dancing at a club with a younger man (one of the few times a non-Bernstein piece of music appears on the soundtrack, including an on-the-nose excerpt from a particularly R.E.M. song), and if it's not meant to look like a man at his most lost and pathetic, Cooper's directorial control might not be as genuine as it appears.

Ignore the broader implications of painting this man's sexuality as the source of his primary downfall. The main problem with Maestro is how much it simplifies the man and this central relationship to the point that such an argument seems likely in the first place.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the Soundtrack

Buy the Soundtrack (Digital Download)