Bradley Cooper “Teacher,” A high-profile biopic that constantly jumps between, offstage, and flies across Leonard Bernstein The very public life as a chauffeur while diving into his more private marriage to Felicia Montealegre. The way each side of Bernstein’s existence interacts with the other is the tension and harmony that characterizes the “Maestro.” Is it authentic? What is performance?
Fortunately, resolving these dualities is not the goal of Cooper’s admirably ambitious, if performative, drama about the musical conscience of twentieth-century America. Bernstein’s multifaceted life was divided between his family life and a series of male lovers, just as it was between leadership and the solitary toil of composition. The Master resists drawing accurate conclusions about any aspect of life that is too contradictory.
“If you have both personalities, I think that means you become schizophrenic and that’s the end of it,” Bernstein (Cooper) says with a laugh in a television interview alongside Montealegre (Carey Mulligan).
“Maestro,” which premieres Wednesday in theaters before streaming next month on Netflix, is not a cradle-to-grave biopic, though it doesn’t avoid some of the genre’s standard pitfalls, either. The film largely revolves around the beginning and end of his relationship with Montealegre, an actor he meets for the first time at a party. “Hi, I’m Lenny,” he says, smiling from the piano bench.
Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealegre and Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein in a scene from “Maestro.” (Jason MacDonald/Netflix via AP)
It’s a framing that has some merit—no matter what the title says, this is Mulligan’s film—and one that also omits many of Bernstein’s more enduring accomplishments. There is little music making here, generally, and almost none of “West Side Story” or “Candide” or “On the Waterfront” or all those influential television shows. Fans like Lydia Tarr You may not agree.
But “Maestro” begins interestingly with a black-and-white ambiguity. Characters exit scenes as if falling through trap doors, a surreal vortex propelled by the vitality of Bernstein’s music. In the first scene, 25-year-old Bernstein is awakened by a call notifying him of his replacement for Bruno Walter in the conducting of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra that night. Intrigued, he opens the curtains, slaps, rhythmically, the bare bottom of the man sharing his bed, and runs down the stairs that magically lead directly to Carnegie Hall.
This won’t be the last time the “Maestro” draws a straight line between lovemaking and music. “If there’s nothing singing in you, you can’t write music,” Montealegre would later tell him. There is no doubt that the music swells more in Bernstein, the “maestro,” when he is freed to be himself.
(Jason MacDonald/Netflix via AP)
On the night of their first date, Bernstein and Montalegre end up on stage, with a single floor lamp casting them in shadow. “Even though you’re the king, you just like me,” she says, explaining his description.
The story quickly takes shape, albeit accompanied by a foreboding sense of marital problems. Another quick trip between scenes ends with the two rushing to the stage of “Fancy Free,” the Jerome Robbins ballet that will perform “On the Town.” Bernstein himself joins the swinging sailors.
“Maestro,” in this first hour almost entirely in black and white, is wonderfully energetic and free from the constraints of a normal biopic. It’s like a dream of modernism in New York in the 1950s. The dialogue moves at a polite clip. The photography, by Matthew Libatique, confidently dives between intimate exchanges and expansive views of the Berkshires at Tanglewood or Central Park. (This is certainly a great movie about Central Park, full of romance and encounters along its paths.)
When “Maestro” moves forward and turns color, it loses its vitality. The film, which Cooper wrote with Josh Singer, skips the decades central to Bernstein’s accomplishments, taking residence instead in the early 1970s.
By then, Bernstein and Montalegre were married with three children (the eldest being Jamie, played by Maya Hawke) and a house in Connecticut. But although Montealegre entered into the marriage with no mystery in her eyes (“I know exactly who you are,” she told him early on), everything was now at odds. I told him that Bernstein’s dalliances had become dirty. During a Thanksgiving discussion in their Manhattan apartment overlooking the park, she said: “If you are not careful, you will die a lonely queen.” At about that time, Snoopy floats inflated in front of the window, like an eclipse.
In scene after scene like this, “The Maestro” is wonderfully presented. But even as the film moves from its tense first hour to its more melodramatic scenes, the artifice takes hold firmly in “The Maestro.” Cooper Bernstein has arrived Under criticism for the artificial nose, but it is the other influences in his performance that stifle him. It’s an honest, thoughtful and sincere performance, but also mannered and showy, awash in turtlenecks, cigarettes and accents.
But Cooper, a sensitive director, was also wise enough to follow Mulligan’s increasingly poignant performance. (It gets top awards, too.) The film’s slide into family dynamics comes at the expense of Bernstein’s larger story, but it provides a beautiful platform for Mulligan to capture a woman who is so infatuated with her husband that she can’t give him up, but who is so clear-eyed. It cannot be destroyed.
“It’s my arrogance to think I can survive on what he can give me,” she says.
It’s a powerfully insightful moment, followed by an extended and emotional recreation of Bernstein in 1976 conducting Mahler’s Second Symphony. The film tells us that there, dancing on the platform in front of the orchestra, may be the place where Bernstein truly gives it his all.
Some of America’s top filmmakers have long been inclined to take on a Bernstein film, including Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg (both credited producers here). But Cooper’s film never finds its balance. If Bernstein’s sex life is the prism through which we view him, why do his male lovers (Matt Bomer does a brief impression) pass by so quickly? “The Maestro” is a wonderful portrait of a complicated marriage. But for a man of symphonies, that leaves a lot of notes unplayed.
“Maestro,” a Netflix release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for some language and drug use. Showing duration: 129 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.
___
Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP
