Maestro

Here's some advice for 2023's MAESTRO - skip right to the sequence where co-writer/director/actor/producer Bradley Cooper, portraying famed composer Leonard Bernstein, conducts the final movement of Mahler's Second Symphony.  Discard the rest of the film.  Really.  There are a few other noteworthy things to be found but for me were not really enough to make it worth the two plus hours.  For here we have a biopic-cum-vanity project that never achieves (despite Bradley's desperate reach for) mastery.  What with awkward attempts at artistry, clumsy symbolism, timeline jumps, omissions, and bombast.  

This was clearly a personal project, a labor of love for Cooper, whose previous directorial effort was the triumphant A STAR IS BORN.  His ambitions as a director seem  boundless, and he employs all the stops to make his film feel genuine.  Matthew Libatique's monochrome photography during the 1940s sequences is mostly impressive.  When Bernstein first meets Felicia Montealagre (Carey Mulligan), the visuals do evoke a real yesteryear feel, via Panavision PVintage.  Cooper also spent months learning how to conduct an orchestra, and his precision is not to be doubted.  

But.....

The screenplay, co-penned by Josh Singer ends up feeling standard and derivative even as it tries not to.  Non-linear storytelling is old hat by now and did not elucidate Leonard or Felicia or anyone else.  This is a maddeningly incomplete telling of a complicated life, of a musician tormented by his bisexuality as much as his talent.  MAESTRO does not give us any depth in either regard.   I never felt I understood these "characters", especially Lenny's boyfriends.  There was a potentially interesting thread involving the Bernsteins' daughter Jamie (Maya Hawke), who was distressed by all the gossip about her pop, but it too never really goes anywhere.  This is another biography as highlight reel, snippets based on a life that was surely more compelling than what we have here.

I found the attempts to be artful a bit embarrassing.  Such as a scene in a garden done entirely in long shot.  To see how it should be done, check out the scene between Paul Newman and Jack Warden on a Boston street captured from a distance in THE VERDICT.

For me, Bradley played it more as caricature than true to life, despite his exhaustive research. A self conscious, "actorly" take that is all technique.  As in A STAR IS BORN, he employs another questionable vocal tone and inflection.  Mulligan has been getting showers of praise for her work and she's fine but unremarkable, fighting an underdeveloped character sketch.  Her Big Scenes - explosive argument with Leonard and the closing moments as she battles cancer, were perfunctory. 

But that Mahler scene is perfect.  Absolutely mesmerizing.  Not just for the technical brilliance of Cooper and the musicians and Michelle Tesoro's editing, but also as also a capsule of the Bernsteins' relationship.  Felicia arrives to watch in awe as her husband guides the orchestra with moves that seem ethereal, and when Leonard lowers the baton and hugs his wife, their interaction succinctly and movingly paints a picture of their thorny union.  It could play as a stand alone short film, perhaps its best possible incarnation.