For its interminable first half hour, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro is the exact movie I feared it would be. After a tiny prologue, in which Cooper’s subject, positioned behind a grand piano, cigarette burning away in an ashtray as he vividly expresses his sadness at his wife’s passing, we’re treated to a maximalist black-and-white depiction of the courtship between Leonard (Cooper) and Felicia Montealegre Bernstein (Carey Mulligan), a Chilean-Coasta Rican actress who fell head over heels for the man but didn’t realize that mean she’d live in his shadow. When I say “maximalist,” I mean it: Cooper swung for the fences with his grayscale rendition of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s in Manhattan when Bernstein began his march toward the top of the list of American conductors that your average schmuck on the street could name. The construction is rough enough: There are flights of dancing fancy – understandable given that Bernstein was in the middle of co-writing On the Town – interspersed with some of the most irritating old-Hollywood riffing you’ll see served up as a substitute for genuine romance on-screen as if Cooper only understands the period through a kind of cinematic shorthand gleaned from sitcom riffs.
His performance is dull and uninspired, the lilt in his affected accent coming across as phony as the rubber nose affixed to his face, and it really feels like Mulligan has been placed in charge of holding the ship together while Cooper experiments with the levels of subtlety as if he were a Bandcamp noise artist trying to figure out exactly which slider to drop before realizing he doesn’t know what any of them actually do (7.8, Best New Music). There are moments – mere moments – in which he comes close to finding the right mixture: a lingering shot of Matt Bomer, playing one of Bernstein’s lovers/collaborators, tears welling in his eyes as he watches the new couple jaunt away in ecstatic entanglement or when Mulligan begins to notice the cracks in Leonard’s façade as her “straight” husband, and the entire segment is held together well by Matthew Libatique’s handsome cinematography. Yet the whole ordeal suggests what I’ve dubbed “Second Movie Syndrome”: A condition marked by excessive flailing, cinematic slight-of-hands, and exaggerated performances, contracted during the filmmaker’s search for some way to top their initial success rather than by organically building upon its established foundations.
What Cooper revealed to us all back in 2018, when he somehow successfully remade one of the true blue Hollywood tales-as-old-as-time in A Star is Born, is that he was a melodramatist of the highest order. That film – with its positioning at the center of the pop and country nexus – was extraordinarily populist: It gave the audience things they wished to see and hear, as well as deep wellsprings of feeling to sink into. If this was his “cheap music,” as the Noel Coward saying goes, its potency could not and would not be denied. Maestro is, weirdly enough, cut from much of the same cloth: it’s about one of the few people who did what they could to bridge the highbrow with the low, out of a genuine affection for the medium that he worked in as well as all the assisted egotism that came with it. The throughline is the same: the rise and fall of Famous Americans rendered sincerely and affectionately, chased with necessary measures of acrid honesty and clarity. The problem with this first half-hour is that it is deliriously lost in an aesthetic fantasy to the point that it can’t wholly be bridged with what follows, to the detriment of the film at large.
See, the thing is, once Maestro turns to color, Cooper stops fucking around and starts throwing heat left and right. It becomes a portrait of a marriage in perfect freefall: Leonard’s at the top of the world, a cultural icon almost on par with the composers whose work he performs, and with that comes ego and power and the realization that he is desired. Moreover, it’s the ‘70s, and the cultural mores have changed drastically, with the life he could have only dreamed of back when he was hiding his queerness becoming openly accepted by the kind of social circles he runs in (in one of the few scenes that land in that first half-hour, one features an elder statesman hinting, through parable, at the kind of sacrifice that he’ll need to make in order to be successful, and time proves to be his rebuke). His dalliances with younger men slowly become more impossible for Felicia to ignore – not only because she feels the lack of her husband’s presence in the emotional landscape of their partnership, but because she’s keenly aware that she is Mrs. Bernstein to the world, with her own talents drowned out because there just isn’t enough space in any given room for her. Leonard always looms extra-large, and she is wanted by no one.
As such, the couple trade vicious insults and escalate their slights – who will Leonard hold hands with at the premiere of his latest work – and the easy hagiography that one might have assumed from that first half hour becomes something so much more complex and human. Maestro never descends into full revisionism, as Cooper is way too human of a filmmaker and writer to ever reduce these complex figures into caricature, but the film is at its best – and I mean Year-End-List best – when it is at its most bitter or at its saddest points. The former is best represented by an astonishingly choreographed and ferociously acted tracking shot that follows Leonard from the entrance to a Thanksgiving gathering (well, the day after Thanksgiving) at his family’s Manhattan residence before he and Felicia, stewing with resentment towards each other, make their way into a study to have it out. What follows is a cross-talk fight, only interrupted when either combatant lands a truly painful barb, and it only ends once Felicia goes nuclear on him. The children call for them, and Leonard is left devastated in the room as she goes to tend to her kids, his pain undercut by one of the best-laid sight gags in recent memory supersized outside the window. This is masterfully executed and lays the groundwork for all of the mess to come.
This 75-minute race-to-the-credits is where Cooper and Mulligan find their rhythm and key into their parts: They aren’t jostling for position in the frame; they’re merely inhabiting it, in make-up that actually suits their ages and positions. That weird affected voice that Cooper used in the first half is submerged to a baritone thanks to decades of heavy smoking and bourbon, and it’s a more natural fit for him. Likewise, Mulligan steers the tragedy at the heart of the film’s third act to a place of recognizable and deeply empathetic sadness, to which Cooper can only provide his emphasis. But what’s notable about this whole section of the film is its patience and cacophony: Cooper never layers on loads of non-diegetic score or anything distracting, instead choosing to key into uncomfortable silences or let the Altman-esque hum of a crowded room fill the diegetic soundtrack. It robs Leonard of his best defense – his contribution to the arts, etc. – and places him on the playing field, as full of foibles and flaws as anyone else in the ensemble. That is, until he throws himself into a piece that acts as the film’s nucleus, a ferocious demonstration of Bernstein’s ability to communicate the intensity and emotion of a given work through his overwhelming force of presence, an unburdening of his heart, for which he is rewarded by Felicia’s return to him. This is the emotional high-point for both of them, a moment where finally, Leonard sees himself as the second-most important person in the room: all he can see is her.
Again, these are the kind of moments that Cooper excels at, and his ability to craft meaningful and emotional scenes that would be treacly in other hands is unparalleled within the modern studio system, given that we’ve moved away from the kind of features he makes as a form of mass entertainment. A Star is Born was a reminder, I think, to audiences that they liked romance and liked tragedy, even with a hook as threadbare as “Finally, Gaga gets the role she’s always deserved.” After that first thirty minutes, Maestro becomes the kind of prestige picture that people always ceaselessly mocked until they realized exactly what they were missing once they disappeared from the landscape. It’s audaciously old-fashioned in its methods, and provides a swell answer to the question: Why the hell would I want to watch a movie about Leonard Bernstein when I could just watch West Side Story or Tar or whatever? It’s because you want to feel some shit, dude, and you’ll be surprised at just how potent it can be. Just fight the urge to watch Cold Case Files reruns until you get to that middle section, because it’s worth it.