If there’s one thing we’re relatively sure of, it’s that Bradley Cooper’s Maestro won’t have the same kind of earth-shaking banger in it that A Star is Born had in “Shallow.” We can’t exactly imagine a bachelorette party gathering around the mic at a karaoke night to sing vocal renditions of famous symphonies or bits and pieces from West Side Story, but, hey, stranger things have happened. On the other hand, people have actually seen Maestro now, and we’re hearing through the grapevine that it… might not be so great?
Between the controversy surrounding Cooper’s make-up to the very idea of cashing in your box-office chips to lay it on the cinematic equivalent of the zero on a roulette table, whatever this winds up being, we’re sure it’ll be interesting, as this new trailer that Netflix dropped seems to imply. But you never know. It could just be boring.
Peep it:
Here’s a synopsis from the NYFF program:
In his directorial follow-up to ‘A Star Is Born,’ Bradley Cooper dramatizes the public and private lives of legendary musician Leonard Bernstein with sensitivity, visual ingenuity, and symphonic splendor. Coasting on the boundless energy of its subject’s runaway genius, ‘Maestro’ transports the viewer back to a vividly re-created postwar New York, when Bernstein (Cooper) began his stratospheric rise to international fame as both a conductor and composer, and also when he first met Felicia (Carey Mulligan), the actress whom he would marry and spend his life with. ‘Maestro’ is a tender, often intensely emotional film about the different faces one wears when living in the public eye, depicting the complicated yet devoted decades-spanning relationship between Leonard and Felicia. Fueled by Cooper and Mulligan’s perfectly matched duet of towering performances, Matthew Libatique’s balletic cinematography, and, of course, Bernstein’s thrilling music, ‘Maestro’ is a tour de force for its director. A Netflix release.
Maestro will hit theaters on November 22, and it’ll be roughly a month before Netflix subscribers get to check it out from the comfort of a laundromat bench on a cracked iPhone 8 screen (no diss, that was a great phone and we miss TouchID so badly) when it arrives on their streaming platform. A month-long theatrical window — they really need to recoup this budget, huh?