In telling the story of renowned conductor-composer-polymath Leonard Bernstein, director, co-writer and star Bradley Cooper improves upon if not reimagines the biopic formula. Maestro focuses on the relationship between Bernstein (Cooper) and his wife, Felicia (Carey Mulligan), which gives the film an anchor and focal point and prevents it from turning into an overly perfunctory procession of life events. “Lenny,” the film quickly shows us, is an upstart composer and conductor mostly interested in men but who becomes enthralled by Felicia, an aspiring actor who, in turn, loves him dearly despite knowing “who he is” — an acceptance that unfortunately spells trouble for her future contentment.
Maestro shows Bernstein’s professional rise to unprecedented heights through the prism of this partnership, which is portrayed as nurturing, sweet and encouraging. Felicia knows Bernstein’s packed schedule, tiered with responsibilities and commitments, better than he does, and, like many women of her day, sacrifices her own potential to help him achieve more and more. The film thankfully doesn’t signpost where we are in time at any given moment (though, besides a minimally distracting framing device, it unfolds chronologically). It will sometimes cut abruptly, eliding months or even years, for maximum impact. The very rhythms and direction of the film are so tied to the Bernsteins’ marriage that the film transitions from black and white to color at the first hint of any discord between them.
Like Bernstein himself, the movie reels you in with its formal panache while keeping you at a distance. An early scene depicting the extended first evening the central couple spends together — not unlike the grocery store sojourn from A Star Is Born, Cooper’s prior directorial effort — is a prime example. Felicia escorts Lenny into her local rehearsal spot to do a casual run-through and flirt heavily, of course. The way that director of photography Matthew Libatique films the interaction is confident but unshowy: in expressive close-ups (a highlight of Maestro in general) and still, fixed angles that see the characters move in and out of view. Cooper’s face isn’t visible for a portion of the scene, in a perhaps too pronounced statement of just how much the film is concerned with Felicia’s plight. In all, Maestro represents some of the uneven Libatique’s finest work.
A little later, a sequence in which Lenny and Felicia take sudden flight from a lunch meeting centered around Lenny’s conducting prospects — wherein someone tells him he could be the first great American conductor — simultaneously entices you and leaves you wanting. Cooper stages the scene as a physics-defying revue of Lenny’s early-ish musical theater work, which the advice-giving fellow at lunch was prompting him to move past in favor of more serious conducting. Felicia and Lenny take a seat in the audience before being plopped improbably right on stage, with Lenny getting caught up and participating in the performance. It’s a low-key bravura sequence that makes one wonder what the film could have done if it were allowed to be just a little more expressionist, rule-bending and strange.
Maestro movingly emphasizes the twin resonances of the conflicting demands of Lenny’s marriage and his sexuality on one hand, and of his desire to be a conductor without wasting his talents as a composer on the other. Although this thread is more explained verbally than it is explored or depicted, we do get to see Lenny at work in some key instances, such as a jaw-dropping sequence in which he conducts at Ely Cathedral that, of course, coincides with a decisive juncture in his and Felicia’s relationship. Moments like these let the undeniably powerful music speak for itself, and they also mean we don’t have to hear Cooper’s irksome vocal affectations, which sound like he’s perpetually congested. His performance here is considerably better than his cartoonish efforts in A Star Is Born, but he largely and somewhat humorously plays Lenny as an overeager Labrador lapping up life. His is also some of the most over-cranked brandishing of a cigarette we’ve seen onscreen in some time.
Unlike in many Oscar-bait biopics though, such gaudiness is restricted to just one or two performances, rather than infecting all aspects of the film. Even when we near the end of these characters’ lives and the lure of sentimentalization creeps in, Cooper as director trusts the material. As a portrait of a queer artist both thriving and running up against the limitations of the 20th century (and an increasingly sexless marriage), Maestro doesn’t touch Terence Davies’s masterful, heartbreaking final film, Benediction. But it gets closer than you might think, even as its psychology, particularly related to its ostensible secret main character, Felicia — the REAL maestro?! — is a bit essentialist and pat. After all, that’s the biopic way.
Photo courtesy of Netflix
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