Maestro, the Context
Carey Mulligan is backcombed and profound in Bradley Cooper's forceful attempt to make us feel what it is to make art.
Bradley Cooper’s Maestro opens with such a crescendo of intimate truth that I sobbed in gratitude at being allowed near such greatness. In the cream-and-red, French-window and flowered chintz ambience of a Connecticut weekend house, an ashtray holds a smoking pyre of cigarettes above the piano, where we see the back of an unmistakable Leonard Bernstein playing a gentle air from his opera ‘A Quiet Place’ as a TV crew films an interview. In tight close-up, Bernstein, a heartbroken, gravel-voiced man in his sixties with huge ears and big features, says, over his half-moon spectacles: “So, to answer your question. Yes. I carry her around with me quite a bit. I’ve often seen her in the garden, working. I miss her terribly.”
Within a nano-second we’re in exceptionally well-lit black-and-white, a square black blind outlined in daylight as the 25-year-old Leonard Bernstein is woken by a call asking him to replace the ailing Bruno Walter on the podium at Carnegie Hall. That same evening. Without rehearsal.
Having lit a necessary cigarette, Lenny (the film’s intimacy is such that at this point he’s too young to be called Bernstein) pulls open the black square to let in the morning, jumps on the bed, plays the drums on his boyfriend’s ass, races out the door and is filmed from above running through a set of corridors that become the actual stage of Carnegie Hall, and in another second, he is backstage that night in a suit, rippling with excitement to get out there and conduct Tchaikovsky’s Manfred.
Ta-da-da-da-da-ta-ta!!
I thought the corridors leading to the stage were artistic license, but have since learned that the young Bernstein lived above Carnegie Hall in one of the studios , which has been recreated, all tiny and cramped, by the brilliant set designer Kevin Thompson.
What seemed fantasy was real, which demonstrates point 2 about glamour. Point 1 about glamour is that what seemed real was fantasy.
The film is called Maestro, but it’s not as much about symphony hall as about the incandescent glamour of the icons of the cocktail generation.
Like his first, A Star is Born, Bradley Cooper’s second movie as a director is set in the context of show-business success, which is different from the context of show-business.
At the pinnacle of the New York meritocracy in the middle of the last century shone a starburst of talented sophisticated people, an exclusive clique who spoke the shorthand of success. Most of them lived in vast apartments filled with clever treasures on the western side of Central Park. Leonard Bernstein, the choreographer Jerome Robbins, the lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green, the fashion photographer Richard Avedon, the movie star Lauren Bacall, and many more, but not too many—these were the coolest adults in the city. Their early successes during the Second World War had flowered on to carry them through productive decades as increasingly majestic celebrities of compelling throwaway elegance, most of whom smoked and drank themselves to early graves. (Lauren Bacall stopped smoking in the seventies and outlived them all.)
High culture had high status in the middle of the 20th century, but the by-products of high culture---fashion photography and Broadway musicals---commanded as much respect, and were far more popular because they were easier to take in . Which is more fun: Abstract expressionist splatter and doom, or an Avedon photo in Vogue? Bernstein’s Symphony number 3, also known as Kaddish, or his score for West side Story? You get my point.
The director and star Bradley Cooper opens the film with those two massive great defining moments, the heartbreak of the old widower and the exuberance of a young artist as he barrels into his breakthrough chance. You are hoisted to such pinnacles of emotion from the outset that you expect even higher emotional peaks, more flourishes to convey how it feels to make art, multiple orgasms of insight.
And you get a story that can be summed up in too few words : Gay boy meets and marries girl who knows he’s gay but doesn’t mind, until she minds, leaves him, gets cancer, reconciles, and dies.
There’s a current misconception that homosexuality was a capital offence until after Aids. And yes, sodomy was a felony on the books in every state until 1962, enforced, I believe, in those states that segregated their water-fountains, buses, and schools.
Hollywood was more like Alabama than New York. Actors hid—and many still hide--their sexuality so as to be convincing romantic leads opposite women, one-face-fits-all movie stars upon whom even the homophobic can project. That’s why California closets are so vast.
At the pinnacles of high culture in New York and Paris, homosexuality was not a sin, it was part of life, often one of the many attributes of the very talented; more of a bureaucratic headache than a shock horror dirty secret.
As the film makes clear, racism, which was directed at Jews as well as at Blacks , created more obstacles than homophobia. The New York/Paris artistic milieu, was barely integrated but tolerant, sexually varied-- heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual. Some gay men married women, some were in decades-long relationships with other men.
The film does not present Leonard Bernstein’s choice to marry Felicia as a ruse to mask his true proclivities, but as a real love that came second to his imperative to make music, and far behind to his need to exercise his charisma on people near and far, male and female, young and old.
Bradley Cooper directs to share his love of the stage and Bernstein’s love of the podium, to bring onscreen the thrilling essence of live performance. He goes all-out to both embody and capture Leonard Bernstein’s fiercely physical conducting, the passionate histrionics of the podium . It’s when Cooper the director tries to bridge the gap between real life and the magic of the stage that the sudden chasm that actors know opens up, the big falter when there’s nowhere in the mimed improv to put the real prop, when the fantasy of the stage is stuck at being staged fantasy.
Cooper tries to dance the Gene Kelly sailor part in On The Town, but he is not a dancer, and the falter shows. He is an actor whose understanding of acting surpasses, for the moment, his skill at telling a full story. But as an actor director, he has a beautiful generosity towards other actors.
In A Star is Born, Bradley Cooper had unfolded Lady Gaga’s talent as an actress. Both Cooper and Lady Gaga were coached by the same extraordinary teacher, the late Elizabeth Kemp. He is carrying on Elizabeth Kemp’s work by making Maestro an actor’s intense, inward two-hander about the marriage of Lenny and Felicia Bernstein. He gives the screen and long, long takes to Carey Mulligan, whose performance marks the passage of time and the attrition of disappointments with a depth and an empathy that surpass anything she’s ever done. Much as I admired everything about Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon, Mulligan’s is the performance that should have won the Golden Globe, and should win the SAG Actor and the Oscar.
Felicia Montealegre was a half-Chilean, half Jewish-American actress who met Bernstein in 1946 and married him in 1951. The young Felicia, composed and frilly, speaks with the crisp debutante inflections of early Katharine Hepburn, and just a hint of a Spanish lisp—“the childwen”. She transforms from eager young actress to magazine-perfect wife of genius, who, in the days when French words defined aspirations, was known for having the best coiffure.
Felicia watches Lenny conduct as she stands in the wings in a ballgown, white kid gloves up to her elbows, cigarette in a long holder. Cooper keeps the camera on Felicia as she drinks in her performing husband , until the unconditional appreciation in her face grows cold. At that exact moment the slightly reverential, mildly arty black-and-white turns to color, and while Felicia remains center screen, it’s her back in an ice blue silk dress that slices against the heavy red drapes of the high living room. And now begins her slide into minding, into menopause, into backcombed reddish hair, composure kept in place by hairspray and politeness, a slide that is Mulligan’s rise into great work.
The scenes of Felicia’s death show that Bradley Cooper’s talent may well be a mastery the unsaid: the tiny scene when Bernstein and his three children get into the family car and drive off, the front passenger seat empty.
The focus on Felicia’s relationship with Lenny leaves no room for us to understand much about the threat to the marriage, the affair between Lenny and the musician Thomas Cothran.
We see Felicia throw herself into the Connecticut pool after Lenny tells her he’s finished writing something, we see Lenny tell his children how brilliant Tommy is, we see Felicia unhappy when Lenny conducts in a British Cathedral, we see Lenny and Tommy holding hands during a performance at Lincoln Center, but we don’t know what Tommy does, or the reason for Felicia’s anger, and I, as a musical dolt, did not recognize the music as Bernstein’s Mass.
Tommny Cothran was a musicologist who became Leonard Bernstein’s assistant and helped him through writing the Mass . The Mass was in effect their love child.
Leonard Bernstein was considered a genius of the 20th century. He aspired to musical greatness, but is remembered more for his Broadway West Side Story and his CBS Young People’s Concerts than for his symphonies, sonatas, liturgies, elegies, or the Mass.
Cooper opens the film with this epigraph. “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between contradictory answers.”
The film stumbles between contradictions, and no film can teach an audience music, but there’s grace in its will to share the exaltation of art, the lies of the heart, the dazzle of success.
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I have seen it twice and will again
Thank you for this eloquent and perceptive review. I loved this movie. I wanted to be in that dazzling, smoke filled mise en scene filled with geniuses. Carey Mulligan is always a revelation and her delicately keen performances are not applauded as loudly as they deserve to be.