Bradley Cooper gives an Oscar-worthy performance in Maestro, a Leonard Bernstein biopic he also directed.
Bradley Cooper gives an Oscar-worthy performance in Maestro, a Leonard Bernstein biopic he also directed.
Maestro (R, 129 mins) Streaming on Netflix
Directed by Bradley Cooper
The best film for 2023 is this last one - an absolutely-must-see.
Bradley Cooper’s authenticity as Jackson Maine in A Star is Born hinted at what was to come in Maestro, which may well win Oscars in several categories: Best Actor for Cooper as composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein; Best Actress for the uber-talented Carey Mulligan as Bernstein’s actress wife, Felicia Montealegre Cohn, likely to be up against Anatomy Anatomy of a Fall’s Sandra Hüller and Barbie’s Margot Robbie; Best Original Screenplay for Cooper and his co-scriptwriter Josh Singer; and Best Cinematographer for Matthew Libatique, who uses doco-style black-and-white at first and a suitably 70s colour palette for the rest.
Kazu Hiro deserves one for Cooper’s make-up, and as Best Supporting Actors, what about Matt Bomer as Bernstein’s lover, the clarinetist David Oppenheim, and Maya Hawke as the Bernsteins’ daughter Jamie?
It’s a biopic with some music, about Leonard and Felicia, with hardly a mention of West Side Story.
That said, there are some awe-inspiring musical performance scenes, such as Cooper playing Leonard conducting Mahler’s Symphony No 2 (Resurrection) with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1973, capturing the enormous power and zeal of Leonard’s famously dramatic conducting style, brimming as it was with heart, soul and magnetism, and fuelled by Felicia who, although aware of Leonard’s serial infidelity, is almost always in the wings.
The Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday says it’s “a movie that bursts with moments of clarity about a man who, despite Cooper’s all-in performance, somehow remains an enigma”.
She says Maestro “isn’t a Great Man tale — if anything, it’s an ode to a Great Woman, but it’s something deeper, messier and more unresolved”.
“It’s a love story as unruly, passionate and expansive as the flawed and fascinating people at its centre.”
It’s a brilliant film, for an adult audience.
As tensions in the Bernsteins’ marriage mount, there’s a bedroom fight while Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade goes on outside.
At the height of the row, Felicia warns Leonard that if he isn’t careful, he’ll end up “a lonely old queen”.
Simultaneously, a giant inflatable Snoopy floats by their window, giving ironic emphasis to her rebuke.
The film opens with an on-screen quotation from Leonard: “A work of art does not answer questions; it provokes them.”
If feeling philosophical, you can watch Leonard on YouTube delivering his lecture series The Unanswered Question at his alma mater Harvard in 1973, in which he addresses where music might be headed, pointing to diversity as mankind’s universal quality, focusing on the philosophy of beauty and claiming that to explain music is to deprive it of its mystery.
Likewise, to explain the Bernsteins would be to deprive them of their mystery.
Suffice to say that Leonard’s life, which he lived fully and enthusiastically, except during bouts of depression, illustrates one of his favourite topics: the autonomy of the human spirit, while Felicia seems to have been put on Earth to demonstrate loyalty and hope, even in the face of despair. A work of art, all of it.
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