LONDON — Was it necessary to lengthen actor Bradley Cooper’s nose to make him look more like musician Leonard Bernstein? A case breaks out on the film Maestro — to be released on Netflix at the end of the year. The make-up of the protagonist seemed to many to be an attempt to give the actor more Jewish physical characteristics. Controversy that for several days has been pouring, in the United States as well as in Great Britain, on the work produced by Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg.
The three children of the famous American composer and conductor, author of the West Side Story soundtrack, wanted to defend the project: “It breaks our hearts – underlined Jamie, Alexander and Nina – that Cooper’s work can be misunderstood. Bradley used the prosthesis to be more like our father in appearance and we are fine with that. We are sure that even our father would have agreed».
Not everyone thinks the same way. Daniel Fienberg, television critic of the Hollywood Reporter, called the false nose “problematic”. “It’s hard to imagine that anyone wondered if it was a good idea to give a ridiculous, huge, pointy nose to a Jewish character,” said Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust, a charity founded in the 1990s to protect the Jewish community in the UK from anti-Semitism and other threats. Cooper’s prosthesis, he claims, is exaggerated. The reaction of Binyomin Gilbert, spokesperson for the “Campaign Against Antisemitism” is similar: “It is important that directors and producers understand why the nose is a problem”, he underlined, specifying that the case recalls clichés and parodies that “we thought outdated”.
As happened with white-skinned actors chosen to represent characters of different ethnic groups, some are now wondering, as already with Cillian Murphy and the role of nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer, why a Jewish actor has not been cast. “His Jewishness was a pillar of Bernstein’s identity – Liora Rez, director of the Stop Anti-Semitism organization told the Guardian – why wasn’t a Jewish actor chosen then?”. If Cooper, in the past protagonist of A Star is Born and American Hustle, was able to interpret (at the theater, in 2014) the Elephant Man, the monster of Bernard Pomerance’s play, without prosthetics, he could have stepped into the shoes of a Jewish musician without correcting his face.
The son of Ukrainian emigrants, Bernstein became the youngest music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1958. When it was suggested that he change his surname to ‘Burns’, for simplicity but also to hide his origins, he stressed that he would rather work under his real name or not work at all.
The project also appealed to the actor Jake Gyllenhaal, for the record Jewish, who had tried to acquire the rights from Bernstein’s heirs in 2018. Cooper, who is the screenwriter and director as well as the protagonist of the film, and Spielberg, were preferred. whose Schindler’s List remains one of the most important films about the Holocaust.
2023-08-17 19:32:26
#Storm #Bernstein #played #Bradley #Cooper #fake #nose #antiSemitic
