Late in the satirical wild ride that was Todd Field’s masterful Tár, our intense and semi-tyrannical conductor heroine (played with sinister panache by Cate Blanchett) escapes the fury-sullied mess of her career by going home in a two-fold way. She revisits the ramshackle Staten Island house of her youth and, most importantly, takes a cathartic dive into VHS tapes of her childhood hero, Leonard Bernstein — as dervish-like conductor and cultural preacher. A rare Hollywood film dealing with the life of a classical conductor, Tár was hailed by some (present company included) as one of last year’s great films, while ruffling feathers in the classical world.
Almost exactly a year later, the “classical conductor as emotionally wrought hero” genre returns to the big screen, thanks to Bradley Cooper’s grand and well-intentioned yet wobbly Bernstein biopic Maestro. This year’s conductor saga is bound to earn more love in the classical community, while winning points as a holiday-timed crowd-pleaser.
And for maximum pleasure, my advice is to resist the temptation to wait for the Netflix home screen option. Instead, do yourself and the film-going experience a favor by catching it on the big screen at the Riviera Theatre, where the state-of-the-art ATMOS sound system best serves the rich tapestry of music folded into the film. For all the dramatic elements packed into the film, a score adorned with such Bernstein classics as West Side Story, Candide, Mass, and Chichester Palms, and keynote doses of Mahler becomes a prime player in the experience, deserving a prime format and high-fidelity sound stage.
As star, director, co-writer, and all-around facilitator Cooper has explained, Maestro is a grandiose labor of love — with hopes for grandiose box office — going back years, before his work in A Star is Born nudged Cooper into loftier cinematic circles. In fact, the film can be traced back to Cooper’s childhood obsession with Bernstein, and the power-wielding act of conducting.
But biopics come equipped with built-in challenges, especially when dealing with the long life and career arc of an artist such as Bernstein, and Maestro weaves in and out of artistic focus. Cooper’s picture opts for the epic, time- and theme-hopping structure to convey the complex portrait of an artist who excelled in the symphonic world, with successful stopovers on Broadway, and whose extravagantly extroverted life included bisexuality, marital bargaining, and other power trips, all while fueled by a steady stream of booze and ubiquitous cigarettes. He lived a life or two, impacted a generation of listeners, and left a powerful legacy.
Faced with such a potent story source, Maestro begins its wild cross-stitching at the beginning, from an interview with the weary white-haired Bernstein, in living color, then swoops backward to the fortuitous moment when young Lenny got his career-launching break subbing for Bruno Walter at Carnegie Hall. On that night, more or less, a star was born.
The earlier part of the Bernstein story is set in mythologizing black and white as he wins over musical theater world with West Side Story, settles into his lifelong relationship with lover-wife Felicia (played with a steady, quiet power by Carey Mulligan) while secreting away his gay impulses, and becoming a rare American celebrity with a hands-on, evangelistic passion for Mahler. When we hear the rueful sublimity of the Adagietto from Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 (which has become something of a gay anthem after its critical use in Visconti’s Death in Venice), we leave the black and white world, and leap ahead in time to the color-ized life of Bernstein in full, angsty bloom.
Cooper later appears in an impressive impersonation of Bernstein’s over-the-top, conductor-as-Godhead conducting in another Mahler moment, when the maestro took on Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection” at Ely Cathedral with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1973. In that scene, with Cooper guided by famed conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the chasm between the historic Bernstein and the would-be maestro Cooper strains to near breaking point.
In one sense, we can long for the simpler times in Cooper’s career, before the pursuit of Big Projects placed undue attention on his sometimes limited acting skills. For all the obvious passion and perfectionism he pours into his Bernstein and into Maestro, we don’t always buy in or achieve suspension of disbelief that we are in the presence of Lenny versus Bradley Cooper play-acting with all his might. This calls more attention to the infamous prosthetic nose and adenoidal voice affect of the later Bernstein characterization. Meanwhile, Mulligan often steals the spotlight with her nuanced performance.
Reservations aside, Maestro is a must-see cinema this year, especially as a still-rare example of “serious music” culture invading theaters. There are great moments along the way. Perhaps the most impressive passage is an almost symphonic sequence sweeping from Bernstein’s actual writing of his ecumenical choral masterpiece Mass at home, with pencil in hand, celebrating its completion with family, savoring the laudatory premiere and then working through a marital conflict passage.
Maybe Maestro will send some back to the inspirational Bernstein-ian source material, like Lydia Tár in her quest for post-traumatic redemption. Others will simply enjoy the ride as a film and a troubled love story, but with profound music in the margins.