Maestro

Think of a biopic of a famous person as like a complex cake - you can carefully dissect one slice of it to examine the contents, or you can bravely try to examine the whole lot to see what it's made of.

This biopic of American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein is like looking at only the surface of the cake through a slice of Swiss cheese - a lot of loosely connected vignettes with no depth. If you don't know much about the man, you would leave the theatre with no great insights about him.

The film jumps around in time and gives you snippets of the man's life and work. There are scenes about his bisexuality and penchant for men, his role as a conductor and composer, his drug addictions and his relationship with his daughter, but none of these are examined in any depth at all. His bipolar relationship with his wife and her later death from cancer are given the most screen time, but still feels unfulfilled and lacking in substance.

Bradley Cooper directs in a rather disjointed style. The first half is shot in black and white, then we change to colour for no good reason except maybe historical chronology - it doesn't work. Neither does the curiously tight aspect ratio, which again inexplicably opens up to full screen near the end. Some scenes are beautifully shot but too often Cooper relies on the slow zoom in and the very long takes, which don't always seem to match the scene. The film also could have ended perfectly with the penultimate scene, but inexplicably ruins the moment with one extra shot that completely fails to land.

Carey Mulligan is excellent as Bernstein's wife but Cooper as Bernstein doesn't quite work for me. He tends to overact, gives you little insight into the man himself, and the nasal voice starts to grate after a while - maybe it was inevitable with the prosthetic nose he was required to wear.

Even the grand concert scene in the cathedral, conducting his beloved Mahler, didn't quite generate the depth of feeling it could have - contrast this with the Tchaikovsky concert scene in the French-Russian film Le Concert, which takes emotion (actors and viewers) to a much higher level.

All in all this is not a bad movie, and to be fair it does engage the viewer a little more in the second half. But it tackles too many themes with a disturbing superficiality, giving very little substance to almost any. It could have been a lot better. No doubt however it will get lots of Oscar nominations, but then the Academy lost the plot years ago and succumbs to hype more than merit.

I went to Maestro expecting a film that would chronicle the life of one of America's, if not the world's, great composer/conductors. I've seen Leonard Bernstein many, many times, starting at age 8 when my grandfather took me to Bernstein's music for kids on Saturday mornings at Lincoln Center. I had no idea who he was at the time, only that people called him Lenny. My grandpa took me to meet him and he was spellbinding. I remember him looking right threw me with his expressive eyes.

He loved kids and loved to teach them about music. Turns out grandpa and Lenny went to Harvard together, hence I got a personal introduction. Bernstein is the guy that got me hooked on classical music and music in general, but I didn't learn anything about his musical career, his childhood, his years at Harvard, his work in Europe, who inspired him, etc.

The making of West Side Story is really interesting (if you know the story) but nothing about it in this film and I mean "nothing.; We get a tiny glimpse of Candide, but nothing about its composition or insight into the Maestro's process. We get zero insight into his Missa Brevis, perhaps on the highlights of his career.

Bradley Cooper blew me away. I've seen Lenny up close many times and I've talked to him a few times. Cooper nailed it, and the scene at St John of the Divine is probably one of the greatest musical scenes ever captured on film. Cooper's conducting is simply amazing. He worked very very hard to capture the speech, mannerisms, and the Bernstein attitude and texture toward music. I cannot speak highly enough of Cooper's performance, but we get so little insight into the musician, and that was so disappointing.

Carey Mulligan? Her performance is nothing less than spectacular, in fact all the acting is extraordinary, but it's not a story. The Bernstein children really have nothing to do in this film, and I have no idea why Lenny's sister was included as she has very little to say or do. Overall, a very perplexing film ... not sure what he was going for. In fact, I kept waiting for it to start. The emphasis was all on style, and believe me, it's beautiful to look at.

I had hoped to enjoy 'Maestro'. It is a film for adult audiences, featuring actors I appreciate (Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan) and directed by that same Bradley Cooper. It deals with a true American Icon (composer / conductor Leonard Bernstein) and deals with the 'man' inside that icon. In this time of Holiday Blockbusters it promised to appeal to an audience like me. And, in fact, it did. The theatre was two-thirds full; a first-time-since-the-Pandemic at this small art house.

The film, however, is something of a mess. It is confused about the type of picture it wants to be. In its first thirty minutes it takes on a flight-of-fancy aura; it is as though Bernstein and his soon to be wife are in a musical-comedy with the background stage settings changing as if by magic. The film's first half is in black and white; I imagine a testament to The Forties and early Fifties (the time period covered by those scenes) but, in fact, lots of color-films were made at that time.

Leonard Bernstein was bisexual. And that bisexuality is, in fact, revealed, but revealed in a coy, teasing, easy-to-misunderstand way. And then there is the background music, all of which was composed by Bernstein, but not all of which fits the scene it backgrounds. The selection from his 'West Side Story' is the most emblematic of this. But not the only example.

For me, the story belongs to Bernstein's wife Felicia (played by Mulligan). She is the wife of a bisexual man; a fact that is problematic enough. But he is a man who is always center-stage, and for whom she gave up a promising career to raise their children, support her husband, and who suffers in silence until she can suffer silently no longer. But even here (and though Mulligan has long been a favorite of mine), there is a smile on her character that (a) rings insincere and (b) is repeated so often that I wanted to scream, No more. But, sadly, there is more; the most cinematic, most hard-to-believe smile coming, in a hard-to believe scene, in London's Westminster Cathedral.

Finally there is the finale. I will give nothing away when I say that the film ends one scene too late, it is one scene too long. A scene in which Bernstein instructs a young orchestra conductor would be as appropriate an ending as one could hope for.

But then .....

It's an old (and unanswerable) question: to what extent is it possible - or desirable - to separate the art from the artist? Is it possible to appreciate the art simply as art, and not to delve into the (sometimes tawdry) details of the artist? Or are the art and the artist so inextricably entwined that you cannot understand the one without knowing the other?

I very much lean towards separation. I fell in love with Bernstein's music the first time I saw West Side Story mumble years ago at an impressionable age; which is why I was disappointed that there was so little West Side Story in this film. Surely a biopic of a composer should feature that composer's music pretty heavily?

Of course, we all know that beneath every great artist is a human being - usually with a collection of human flaws. But does this matter? Well, it matters here. What we mostly get is a film about Leonard the man, and his complicated marriage to Felicia Montealegre. Much of this was new to me. I knew that Bernstein was bisexual, but didn't care. I find that I also don't care about most of the other details of his life which were revealed to me - although if the film was truly about the man, not his music, his record as a human rights activist should probably have been at least touched on. But never mind that: I came for the music, and didn't get enough.

Not that this film is without merit. Bradley Cooper's performance is first class - there's one sequence in which he truly shows us the passion of a great conductor - and Carey Mulligan is as riveting as ever. Cinematography and sound are both excellent.

Overall, this is a good film, but ultimately a disappointing one.

The acting is superb and particularly Carey Mulligan who is astonishing, as usual, and Bradley Cooper's transformation is incredible. The look and feel throughout is very polished. But, and this isn't a minor quibble -- I found it really hard to understand the dialogue! Characters speak so quickly, in a mumble, that I actually considered putting on subtitles. Anyway, it wouldn't have made a difference, I thought the movie was so empty and plotless and uninteresting. There was really no tension in the wife's dealing with her husband's bisexuality, no real exploration or understanding of Bernstein's conflicts, and no delving into his achievements or their context, so there wasn't much left!