Bradley Cooper's Leonard Bernstein Biopic is Maestro-ful
Dark and unorthodox, Cooper's latest film is weird, off-putting, and intimate
Maestro, Bradley Cooper’s new film depicting the relationship between composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein and actress Felicia Montealegre, features little conducting or composing. Repeated allusions are made to Bernstein’s conducting prowess, and the effect his fame and decisions take on his family is well-documented in the film. The film cares less how or why Bernstein was famous but his fame’s consequence, portraying Bernstein and Montealegre’s nearly three-decade relationship as complicated by Bernstein’s increasingly indiscrete extramarital excursions with both women and men and Montealegre’s growing reckoning with her husband’s dalliances and the toll it takes on their children. Kept in the background, however, is the conducting that makes him famous.
A handful of incredibly brief conducting sequences are shown in Maestro, but a sense of Bernstein as a conductor, and the overall purpose of the film, is not truly given until the remarkable, overwhelming sequence of Bernstein conducting the London Symphony Orchestra performing Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection” at Ely Cathedral.
The nearly ten-minute sequence, which is quite possibly the best sequence in any film this year, bowled me over. I cried, had chills, and realized once it ended I was holding my breath; the only reason I did not stand up and applaud afterward was because I was in public. It is, frankly, staggering, all the more so because the conducting sequence acts as a skeleton key of sorts to Maestro’s heart. Coming at a pivotal moment in Bernstein and Montealegre’s relationship, how exactly the sequence unlocks and enhances the film gives away too much of what makes it special; suffice it to say, Bernstein’s prowess plus the more precise nature of his and Montealegre’s relationship are fully revealed in a highly extraordinary fashion.
This is a show of force from Cooper. His directorial debut, 2018’s A Star is Born, is a toweringly intimate portrayal of the thin lines between both romantic and familial love and hate. I consider the first hour of A Star is Born as one of the best movies anyone has ever made, and the remaining hour and twenty movies are excellent melodrama with moments of sheer exceptionality.
Maestro is decidedly not A Star is Born, reflecting Cooper’s admirable – and thus-far realized – ambitions as a filmmaker. He could have simply made a similar film as overtly human, romantic, and accessible that it was essentially A Star Named Leonard Bernstein is Born, but he did not. Instead, Maestro is a dark, idiosyncratic, and almost inscrutable sophomore offering but, ultimately, profound, rewarding, and astonishing.
The film opens with a quote from Bernstein’s writings, “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.” That is precisely what Cooper has achieved: a film that provokes questions – what does it mean to love, what sacrifices must be made in that pursuit, what parts of ourselves and our love do we hinder for society? – leaving the viewer to stew in the tension between their contradictory answers.