‘Maestro’ Review: Bradley Cooper's Empty Spectacle
Despite striking images from Matthew Libatique, Bradley Cooper fails to peer through the public façade of Leonard Bernstein in the ridiculously formless and inert MAESTRO.
Who is Leonard Bernstein? To the eye (or ear) of music lovers, he was a genius and revolutionary composer who evolved music creation by bending the rules to create new tempos and forms of songwriting. West Side Story wouldn’t have been such a hit without Bernstein’s time signatures. On paper, it sounds ridiculous, and yet his clear-cut vision worked and propelled him to the top of one of the greatest composers who ever lived, on par with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, to which Bradley Cooper’s Maestro attempts to paint him on the same pedestal.
But to Felicia Montealerge Cohn, Bernstein was a far more complex human being, openly having affairs with other men and women while they were married. He lived as a closeted gay man in a marriage to a woman he was infatuated with, but this ultimately took a toll on Felicia, who directly wrote to him, “You are a homosexual and may never change — you don't admit to the possibility of a double life, but if your peace of mind, your health, your whole nervous system depend on a certain sexual pattern what can you do?”
There is so much material to treat in Maestro, and I’ve barely scratched the surface. One could entirely focus on Bernstein, the artist, and make a great movie, while a more psychologically active biopic on Bernstein, the individual, through the gaze of Montealerge, could pave the way for a reinterpretation of Bernstein’s legacy in the public sphere. Cooper’s second feature after his riveting A Star is Born remake attempts to do both in a ridiculously short amount of time (129 minutes) – and fails at answering the core question that any biopic should answer - why is this person’s story worth telling?
From the get-go, Cooper and cinematographer Matthew Libatique dazzle with a controlled but consistently changing sense of style, evoking the works of Orson Welles during the film’s black-and-white sequences with a striking use of deep focus that slowly evolves into color, where Cooper directly takes inspiration from Vincente Minnelli and Sydney Pollack. The visual language is richly layered and perfectly calibrated, with a show-stopping sequence set in the Ely Cathedral where Cooper as Bernstein conducts Gustav Mahler’s Resurrection as the film’s major highlight.
But it’s also the only time audiences get a true glimpse at Bernstein, the revolutionary artist whose intense conducting techniques are terrifically recreated by Cooper, aided by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, to bring the spirit of Bernstein back to life. The rest of the film only briefly shows Bernstein composing or conducting. It’s an intentional choice but one that robs our understanding of who Bernstein was as a pioneer. We’re repeatedly told he is, yet we never glimpse how he came up with his most famous compositions.
As a result, when Cooper [finally] gets to the Ely Cathedral, the sequence is strikingly realized from an audiovisual point of view but emotionally hollow. Had the film [occasionally] shown those moments of creation, the centerpiece scene would’ve made more sense and felt more investing. But Cooper doesn’t seem interested in peering through the public façade of Bernstein in his personal life with Felicia (played in the film by Carey Mulligan) and prefers instead to distract its complete lack of substance and exploration of Bernstein with the most copious use of the Academy ratio since Michel Hazanavicius made The Artist in 2011.
Yes, the images are great, but remove that and you’ve got virtually no narrative and/or thematic thread separating the fragments in Lenny and Felicia’s lives. There are a lot of implicit moments in both Cooper and Mulligan’s facial expressions, which is fine if the film thematically presented their relationship as complex, but the distance felt between the two is staggering. There isn’t a single scene in which their chemistry feels genuine: Cooper consistently over-directs (and overacts) in every underwritten scene, with Mulligan’s accent more distracting than it is compelling.
If we can’t feel some form of infatuation between the two, whether from a musical-like scene that operates from the transition to black-and-white to color or at least a personal bond, such as when Felicia is diagnosed with terminal cancer, how does Cooper expect us to engage with what’s on-screen? The final half-hour of Maestro is ridiculously inert, with Cooper and screenwriter Josh Singer going through every trope in the “sad half” of a biopic, coupled with the diagnosis scene where an actor breaks down for the Oscar clip, the coughing of blood to signal that a character is dying, and the contemplative moments of solitude where your professional life is now meaningless because the person most important to you is slowly drifting away.
All of these moments are found and aren’t particularly effective because there’s no development on Cooper’s part to at least [interestingly] flesh out Bernstein and Montealerge from their one-note attributes. Bernstein is the same when we first meet him than when we ultimately leave him, and the same can be said for Felicia, whose longing gaze is always close to Lenny, but there’s never an “a-ha!” moment where we get to understand why Bernstein was this way towards Felicia, and why her life was radically different from the moment she met him.
Perhaps the most on-the-nose moment that describes how formless this entire thing is arrives within its coda, where Libatique’s frame opens from 1.33:1 to 1.78:1, and Bernstein drives his care to the campus, while R.E.M’s It’s The End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) blasts on his speakers. As soon as the car drives by the camera (coupled with a MAESTRO license plate), the sound cranks up hard so the audience can hear Michael Stipe say LEONARD BERNSTEIN as if the audience didn’t know this film is about Leonard Bernstein. Yes, Maestro is about Leonard Bernstein, but it’s also not about Leonard Bernstein, in the sense that it says nothing about him while being constantly about him.
The visual (and aural) cues and the presence of his music consistently remind us that it’s about Bernstein, yet Cooper never explores Bernstein. He never asks himself why he wants to do this, or more aptly, why he thinks Bernstein is a fascinating figure. I’ll tell you why he wants to do this: he wants to win an Oscar because there isn’t a single moment in this film that doesn’t scream Oscar bait. From the lavish, perfectly-constructed cinematography to its sound design and class-A prosthetic work from two-time Academy Award winner Kazu Hiro, every single element is designed to appease Academy members in this so-called maestoso piece of cinema that Cooper has crafted from a technical point of view.
But when you pluck out the craft and get to the meat-and-potatoes of Maestro, the film is ridiculously formless and has nothing of interest to say about Bernstein’s life as an artist and human, either through his eyes or Felicia’s. Younger people may not know of Bernstein’s contributions to music and his highly-documented personal life going into Maestro, which is a very good thing for their own cultural knowledge. They still won’t know a thing about him when they leave Maestro.