Maestro
NetflixWhen Todd Field’s Tár came out in 2022, quite a few audience members thought the titular orchestra conductor portrayed by Cate Blanchett was a real figure. Such a mistake is easy to understand: from the way the film is framed narratively and aesthetically to the amount of depth and insight that is given into the life, loves, and manipulations of Lydia Tár, she really does feel like a well-rounded, historic figure that walked the Earth. It is ironic, then, that a psychological drama on a fictional character is more in-depth, compelling, and memorable than the biopic on the greatest American conductor and composer: Leonard Bernstein in Bradley Cooper’s Maestro.
With his 2018 remake of A Star is Born, Cooper proved that he is a very confident filmmaker. His time spent on set with the likes of Guillermo del Toro, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Derek Cianfrance clearly influenced his filmmaking style, with the first half of Maestro (all shot on black and white film by the great Matthew Libatique) being a tremendous showcase of his talent. The narrative primarily focuses on the relationship between Bernstein and actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), a marriage that featured many hardships, including the composer’s homosexuality. With both of his features, Cooper shows that he knows how to have a compelling hook: the courtship between Bernstein and Montealegre, his pursuit of musical greatness and love for stage plays, all of it is played like a more polished version of a Howard Hawks or Ernst Lubitsch romance from the 1930s. It is endearing, funny, inspiring, and just plainly well crafted, with both Mulligan and Cooper sharing tremendous chemistry on screen and perfectly capturing the specific speech cadence of their real-life counterparts.
It is unfortunate then that the second half of the movie really does not go in any interesting direction. Maestro ends up feeling like a cliff notes version of two rich and complex lives, with audiences never getting a chance to truly get to know them. It may be refreshing that the story skims over Bernstein’s artistic process – something that was tediously explored in the loathsome Bohemian Rhapsody – with such restraint culminating in the centerpiece of a long take of Cooper conducting a Mahler symphony inside a cathedral, but one question remains: what is learned here?
As a romance, Mulligan does her best with a role with diminishing returns, forced into a one-note portrayal of marital relationships that is conveyed exclusively through dialogue and barely through actions and visuals. As a portrait of an artist, Bernstein’s genius never fully comes into place the way it did in the monumental Amadeus or the more experimental I’m Not Here. As a tale of a man forced to hide his homosexuality, it just feels like an afterthought, with none of the male lovers ever feeling more like caricatures or faceless shadows without a personality. A shame, because the craft on display here is outstanding, from the costumes and hairstyle to the sets, but it is all in service of a rather pedestrian feature film. Bernstein fans might take more out of it than the average Netflix viewer, and for what it is, the two-hour runtime does fly by better than A Star is Born’s, but it is hard to shake off the feeling that Maestro could have been so much better than it is, with the existence of Tár only lessening the weight of the efforts of Cooper’s production.