Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan Sing Leonard Bernstein’s Life Story
DIRECTOR: BRADLEY COOPER/2023
Maestro opens with a quote: “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.” With this, co-writer/director/star Bradley Cooper seems to be anticipating and answering any criticism we might have for him or for his subject and the source of that quote, Leonard Bernstein.
Maestro is a tale of two Leonard Bernsteins. The first Bernstein is the reliably genius composer and conductor. After a chance break conducting at Carnegie Hall, his career skyrockets into the New York City music scene, On the Town, On the Waterfront, and West Side Story. Enchanting in interviews and brilliant in front of an orchestra, Bernstein proves several times over why he is still one of the most important voices in American music. The second Bernstein is the erratic artist and unfaithful husband. After wedding actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), he cannot abandon his flirtations or obsessive work habits. Exhausting in relationships and self-assured to a fault, Lenny makes their marriage a ménage à trois—or perhaps a ménage à quatre, cinq, or six between his many lovers and symphonies.
Maestro is also a tale of of two movies. The effulgent first half rejects any notions of a standard biopic, skipping the conventions that often make films in this subgenre feel like Wikipedia recitations. In Bohemian Rhapsody and Respect, we saw Queen and Aretha Franklin strum through notes and fiddle with lyrics until they had a hit; Maestro has no time for such dilly-dallying. Cooper and Josh Singer’s script reads like a series of impressionistic memories, skipping the creative process to observe small moments in the Bernstein family history. Lenny and Felicia don’t fall in love to a montage but a ballet dream sequence inspired by On the Town. Cooper (and collaborators like cinematographer Matthew Libatique) change cameras, aspect ratios, shooting style, and lighting to reflect contemporary films of each era we’re in from 1943 to 1989. For the first hour or so of this 129-minute film, the filmmaking is filled with as much kinetic energy as the Katharine Hepburn-adjacent speaking style of our leads. Even better, a theatrical viewing brings a renewed energy to the best of Bernstein’s catalog with surround sound that can’t be replicated watching at home on Netflix.
Almost the moment we switch to color film, however, the momentum slows, turning this biopic into standard Oscar bait. Shouting! Infidelity! Cancer! Drug abuse! These may be factually accurate to the lives of our subjects, but why must their telling be so rote? With Cooper and Mulligan on screen, we are at least still graced with performers who find the truth in the joy and frustration of a textbook Enneagram 4/Enneagram 9 relationship. Both are as strong as they’ve ever been, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we keep hearing their names through Awards Season. (Will Cooper’s Oscar clip showcase his disappointment in a conversation with his daughter played by Maya Hawke? Or will it be his sweat-dripping conducting of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 at Ely Cathedral?)
The Bernstein quote opening the film is also a disclaimer, apologizing in advance to an audience indecisive about the legacies of people with both great talent and great flaws. Is Bernstein a semi-absent father who teases his family with a love he ends up giving to his work instead? Is he grooming young men, promising them career advancement in exchange for sexual favors? Maestro provokes these questions, but because its story is mere description of orchestral arrangements and one man’s philosophy on music, it is not in its nature to decide for its audience.
Just before that quote appears in Bernstein’s 1966 book The Infinite Variety of Music, he poses many questions about the future of symphonies and can only resolve them thus: “If I may be pardoned for a quasi-existential paradox, I suggest that the answer is in the questioning. By experimenting with the problem, by feeling it out, by living with it, we are answered. All our lives are spent in the attempt to resolve conflicts, and we know that resolutions are impossible except by hindsight. We can make temporary decisions (and do, a thousand times a day), but it is only after death that it can be finally perceived whether we ever succeeded in resolving our conflicts.” Funnily enough, his exploration also mentions Herman Melville’s novel Billy Budd, which he says is “two stories, really” and that Melville “does not cue you on how to read it,” both of which were observations I made about Maestro before I found this quote’s context. If you leave Maestro with mixed feelings about its protagonist and about the film itself, I daresay Cooper and even Bernstein himself would be alright with that.