Maestro, which opened in theaters in Israel on Thursday (and is coming to Netflix on December 20), is a high-minded biopic of master musician Leonard Bernstein that is so tasteful, even his nose does not really seem that big.
I’m referring, of course, to the prosthetic nose Bradley Cooper, who stars in and directed the movie, wears to make himself look more like Bernstein. This schnoz ignited huge controversy when the trailer was released, with many calling it antisemitic, a ridiculous claim. The nose looks very natural and had I not known what Cooper actually looked like, I wouldn’t have guessed it wasn’t real.
While the makeup artist Kazu Hiro deserves every award possible, the rest of the movie does not rise to the heights of the nose. Cooper demonstrates once again, following A Star is Born, that he is a masterful – no pun intended – director, and that he can give wonderful performances when he is behind the camera.
But the problem here is not Cooper’s Oscar-worthy performance, but a badly misconceived script, which Cooper co-wrote with Josh Singer. The script isn’t bad so much as wrong, from beginning to end, barely giving a sense of why Bernstein was such an iconic figure on the American cultural landscape, and focusing on some of the blandest and least interesting aspects of his life.
Those under 60 may not even have heard of Bernstein, who died in 1990, let alone know what an extraordinarily talented composer and conductor he was and that he enjoyed near pop-star celebrity status.
When I was growing up in New York City, people would talk about having seen him around almost the way they would speak about glimpsing John Lennon, another New York resident at that time. This is all the more impressive given that he composed and conducted classical music, as well as scores for Broadway shows.
Bernstein’s success was particularly meaningful to the American Jewish community, because, unlike so many others in the arts in this era, Bernstein never tried to hide his Jewish identity. Later in life, he embraced his heritage in a particularly prominent way, composing the music for a ballet, Dybbuk, based on ancient Jewish folklore.
Another significant aspect of Bernstein’s life, is that he was either bisexual or homosexual, depending on which biography you read, and in any case, had affairs with men throughout his life, which was an open secret in New York and the music world.
The movie's execution and characters
THE MOVIE focuses on Bernstein’s marriage to Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), to such an extent that it might have been called, Scenes from a Maestro’s Marriage. Felicia was a Chilean-Costa Rican actress who had a Jewish grandfather and who converted to Judaism when she married Bernstein, although this aspect of their relationship is not mentioned in the movie.
She realized early on that he was attracted to men and accepted the situation. They had three children and the marriage lasted until her death from cancer. Theirs was clearly a real partnership, whether or not there was passion between them.
She put her career on hold when they married and in general took a backseat to her charismatic husband. Her coming to terms with the harm she did to herself through her lifetime of self-effacement is at the heart of the film.
Mulligan has a particularly moving scene in which she acknowledges this, which will guarantee her an Oscar nod. The attraction she felt for him early on is cleverly dramatized in a scene where she attends a rehearsal of a ballet for which he wrote the score, the Ballet Theater’s Fancy Free. This ballet was the basis for the later Broadway show, On the Town, about three sailors out for a day of fun in New York.
It was choreographed by and starred Jerome Robbins, who is a minor character in the movie, and as Bernstein and Felicia watch it, she imagines her future husband as one of the dancers performing a sensual solo.
This is one of the moments when the movie’s understated approach works best. In the scenes in black and white that tell the story of his early life and career, his sexual orientation is made clear – when he gets the call to conduct at Carnegie Hall for the first time, he is in bed with a male lover – but his sexuality is downplayed as his emotional connection to Felicia is highlighted.
A few men come and go in his life, often insinuating themselves into their family circle in a way that was obviously hurtful to Felicia. He eventually moved to California with Tom Cothran (Gideon Glick), who doesn’t have much of a presence in the movie, and he returned to the East Coast when Felicia became ill. But the movie is about Leonard and Felicia, and not the men in his life.
IT’S ALSO more about his classical conducting than about his contributions to American musical theater. A few moments in the movie are devoted to him writing the score for West Side Story, but it never delves into his collaboration with Robbins, the choreographer, or Stephen Sondheim, the lyricist, which is a shame.
West Side Story became an iconic show and movie, and much of its impact was due to Bernstein’s score, which mixed jazz, Latin, and symphonic music. Anyone who has seen it will probably be able to hum at least some of the tunes for the rest of their life, which is an extraordinary achievement for a composer. But the visceral fun of West Side Story’s music and the creative firestorm of its production apparently didn’t fit with the restrained, even muted story Cooper wanted to tell.
The movie omits another very significant moment in his life: the fallout from the 1970 fundraiser they hosted for the Black Panthers at their lavish apartment, which Tom Wolfe lampooned in a famous essay for New York Magazine entitled, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.”
The article coined the phrase “radical chic,” now perhaps more relevant than ever, and poked fun at the absurdity of uniformed servants passing trays of hors d’oeuvres as music and art world luminaries rubbed shoulders with black revolutionaries.
While Wolfe wrote with a certain admiration for Felicia’s elegance and Bernstein’s presence, the article provoked endless jokes among the chattering classes and according to various biographers, caused Felicia in particular much distress.
Everything in Maestro is carefully thought out and well executed, and Cooper gives an excellent performance in the lead, even in the scenes where he has to play a character much older than his real age. Mulligan shines throughout as the woman who chose to stay by his side even when she was hurting.
But what Maestro sorely lacks is the excitement that Bernstein brought to his every endeavor and that catapulted this young Jewish man from a middle-class family to the highest echelons of the music world. People in the movie talk about Bernstein’s charisma, but we don’t really feel it in this fatally refined movie.