It was a last-minute stand-in. The young, enormously talented composer and protagonist of the new Netflix movie Maestro, Leonard Bernstein conducted a New York Philharmonic concert in 1943. Later, he became its chief conductor, star, king of parties and a face that is at home on television screens. However, the chamber drama mainly follows the more painful aspects of his life.
Five years ago, with his directorial debut A Star Is Born, actor Bradley Cooper proved that he has bigger ambitions than just repeatedly striving for an acting Oscar, for which he has already been nominated four times. His debut, like the new Maestro, focused on the love life of a music star and the dark moments that come with fame or the status of a musical genius.
After the fictional country singer Jackson Maine, Cooper – as the lead actor, director and co-writer – has now dedicated an entire film to one of the greatest musical figures of the 20th century. It avoids pomp, but also avoids a lot of key things.
The film seemingly begins at the moment when Leonard Bernstein rose to prominence. And his stint with the New York Philharmonic in 1943, as well as his later engagement as its chief conductor from 1958 to 1969, undoubtedly launched a great career. Full of lectures, parties, political speeches, participation in TV talk shows. The charismatic composer popularized classical music, attracted millions of viewers to the screens and cycle Concerts for young audiences supported colleagues.
But in the beginning, Bernstein was above all a promising composer. He composed the first symphony, a genre then expected from every aspiring composer, under the title Jeremiah in 1942. He subsequently entered the history of musicals On the Town a West Side Story. Songs like New York, New York from On the Town, in the rhythm of jazz and with the help of snapping fingers, they talked about the neuroses of the post-war suburbs and became part of American culture.
The engagement with the New York Philharmonic was not the beginning of a career, as the film suggests, but a fateful decision that strongly negatively affected Bernstein’s compositional career. Journalist Alex Ross compares him to President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in the book Only Noise Remains: both graduated from Harvard University, both had to overcome in one case Russian-Jewish, in the other Irish origin, both achieved success, both had their sexual secrets and both were the subject of critics, whether there is real potential behind their charisma, or whether they have squandered it.
Bradley Cooper in the role of Leonard Bernstein can convey the pain of someone who is surrounded by people and struggles with loneliness inside. | Photo: Jason McDonald
However, the director, screenwriter and representative of Bernstein Cooper focuses primarily on family and sexual relationships in the novel. Its drama mainly depicts Bernstein’s cohabitation with his wife Felicia Montealegre, an aspiring actress played by Carey Mulligan.
After the opening black-and-white passages from the 1940s and 1950s, the film moves into the colorful reality of the beginning of the seventh decade. And he observes how Bernstein’s family life and moods are affected by the conductor’s desire for company. Including the company of men whose sexual affections he was not too secretive about, at least from his wife at this stage of the relationship.
Cooper and co-writer Josh Singer have written a tasteful, measured drama. It often takes a detached look at the ups and downs of an artist dealing with a schism so common in the industry that it’s become a bit of a cliché in the biopic genre – a genius needing the freedom to create versus the burden of family life and other social conventions.
Maestro avoids tension, but also concreteness. He works with plot points, often lets the characters speak, and captures the scene in such a big way that we don’t see the protagonists. Or they just indicate tension, for example when in one scene Bernstein walks out of a door and looks in a direction indicating that a counter-shot must come – to make it clear what the tension in his face is coming from. And the counter shot won’t come.
But with these directorial decisions, it seems as if Cooper somehow left out Bernstein himself, as if he were shooting a universal drama about the vicissitudes of a talented artist.
Bradley Cooper jako Leonard Bernstein a Gideon Glick coby Tommy Cothran. | Foto: Jason McDonald
A key scene comes sometime in the third when Bernstein is interviewed by a journalist for the purposes of the book. It highlights his achievements, whether Concerts for young audiences or a series of lectures Omnibus, which reached millions of viewers. He mentions how West Side Story changed the American musical. And he adds that rather than these biographical facts, he wants to devote space to how the composer and conductor feels.
“I feel like the world is on the verge of collapse, that’s how I feel,” replies Bernstein. And they talk about the lack of creativity that permeates society, as well as their own gloomy states. “I have a few factors that save me,” he adds shortly. “I like people. And I like music. I love it so much that it keeps me going even when I’m depressed.” He then notes how he loves people so much that the constant need to be surrounded by them prevents him from composing.
It’s kind of a side note. At the same time, it is a key theme in the protagonist’s life. The artist, who created remarkable, now classic, but then modern pieces of American culture, created only sporadically after his engagement with the New York Philharmonic. Although he remained a great interpreter of other people’s music, he did not follow up on his earlier success as a composer.
When, in one of the later passages of the film, Bernstein, while rehearsing Dmitri Shostakovich’s fourteenth symphony, speaks to the audience about death and the maxim that commands the artist to remain free, it seems from the context that he is talking about the binding shackles of the family. Because it is precisely the painful, yet tolerant relationship of the wife to the conductor’s escapades, to the absence at family dinners and on such important holidays as Thanksgiving, that is the central theme of the film.
Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealegre and Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein. | Photo: Netflix
In yet another Oscar-aspiring performance, Cooper embodies a man living under pressure, beyond the normal perception of others, whose lives he passes through as a destructive force, albeit one capable of great emotion.
The actor can convey the pain of a person who is surrounded by others and at the same time struggles with loneliness inside. Some scenes talk about it literally – when the hero sits, literally surrounded by faces, hands a tray of cocaine to someone above and notes that the powder from a stranger’s nose is pouring back onto his head.
A cohesive biographical drama was created, especially by Netflix standards, which will not be without chances for the Oscars. As much as it has a lot of impressive scenes, it seems to forget about the protagonist the whole time. He clings to the attention of young people from the industry until the end, whom he refers to as “his little leprechauns”. And when the final scene leaves him trapped in the solitude of a crowded dance floor, a synthpop hit blaring Shout of the Tears for Fears project from the 1980s, there could not be a more fitting conclusion.
This final “scream”, as the translation of the song’s title reads, is intense, abounding in clear symbolism, yet – like the entire film – it ends with a somewhat interchangeable, if perhaps visually bewitching, capture of the artist’s painful life.
There would probably be no space in the Hollywood narrative for the real pain stemming, for example, from the fact that a composer who wanted to reform the musical theater in the 1950s and did not hesitate to compare the situation to the one before the arrival of Mozart finally abandoned his creative goals. Who cares about something as boring as the history of 20th century music.
Those who know the fates of those portrayed in detail and like to delve into the deviation from reality are often the most against biographical pictures. Maestro, on the other hand, can perhaps be quite a tasteful addition to Bernstein’s purely musical fortunes for connoisseurs, as he fills in the blanks and the lack of context on his own. But for the average viewer, after the initial black-and-white and sometimes captivating scenes, the film can easily turn into a somewhat dull spectacle about the antics of a great man with the arrival of color and the late period of Bernstein’s life.
Film
Maestro
Director: Bradley Cooper
The film is available on Netflix.
2023-12-28 13:13:13
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