Fran Magazine: Issue #74
Fran Magazine breaks down the Maestro trailer for easter eggs, reveals, hidden messages, and Mahler
Thanks for reading Fran Magazine, a biweekly blog by Fran Hoepfner (me). This issue is for all subscribers, paid and not, as well as general audiences. Usually even-numbered issues are for paid subscribers, but I am feeling generous on account of the forthcoming Maestro season. Consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription for access to more Fran Magazine. It’s worth it!
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The Maestro mindset
For six of the happiest weeks of my life last summer, I got to write blogs for the yet-again defunct Gawker dot com about paparazzi photos from the set of Bradley Cooper’s Maestro. I’m not really sure how to explain it; either this is the funniest thing you’ve ever seen in your life, or we’re different.
I’ll try to explain: for one, imagine you are me, you are a Jewish child who loves classical music, there are few people more important and — quite essentially — more accessible than Leonard Bernstein. There are videos of him everywhere. He had a children’s television show! He is like a walking commercial for PBS: a thinker and an artist and a genius who could also make himself funny and seemingly approachable. He’s an icon.
Similarly, you have television’s Bradley Cooper who you came to know through the first few seasons of Alias. I’m lying to you if I said I can remember knowing who Leonard Bernstein is and was longer than I’ve known who Bradley Cooper was. They most likely entered my consciousness at the same time, and for that matter, they are equally iconic.
In 2018, Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut, a remake of A Star is Born, came out to near-universal claim. It was not just that Bradley Cooper — a guy we all know as an actor who was in both The Hangover and American Sniper — made a great, romantic movie musical, it was that the trailer for that movie was the funniest and most insane thing anyone had ever seen.
Do you remember where you were when the A Star is Born trailer came out? I was living in New Jersey and I was going wackadoo in grad school, and seeing this trailer made me only more wackadoo. It’s like, Bradley Cooper sings? I guess so. Lady Gaga is in the movie and we’re all supposed to pretend she’s just a regular girl — done. Easy. She sings “Shallow” — one of the best songs from the past decade. Bradley Cooper is doing a batshit gravelly Southern accent (movie explains this using perfect movie logic) and says stuff like, “HEY!” and “I just wanna take another look at you.”
It is hard to explain an ecosystem where movies buy becoming a meme (Barbie), accidentally become a meme (Oppenheimer), become a meme regardless of quality (The Last Voyage of the Demeter), are actually artful and compelling (Passages), or escape memefulness completely on account of being juiceless and weird (The Meg 2 — presumably, I haven’t seen it, but I’ve been warned of its juicelessness), that a movie that became a meme but was also good but was also a debut but was also directed by the world’s most humorless but also truly funny actor could exist. A lot of people have strived for this and failed.
“All ya gotta do is trust me,” says Jackson Maine (Cooper). So now he’s tasked us with trusting him on a new venture: Maestro, his Leonard Bernstein biopic. I will trust you, Bradley!!!!
It’s possible that the Maestro trailer has left you more confused than ever before — who is that (it’s Maestro), what song is that (it’s Mahler), who is she (Maestro’s wife), isn’t he (kind of). Luckily, I am here to decode the many mysteries of Maestro in its first theatrical teaser.
Maestro, Explained
This is Maestro (Leonard Bernstein [Bradley Cooper]) and his wife Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein (Carey Mulligan). They’re in a park, sitting on the ground, learning to count, which is what people did in the late 1940s/early 1950s if they weren’t listening to jazz or classical music on the radio or wishing that one day no one would invent email. Bernstein and his wife were married nearly thirty years with several years towards the end of their relationship spent separated. Their lives were complicated, which we can tell because the scenes in the past are shot in black and white.
You might be thinking, “I didn’t know this movie was gonna be shot in 4:3?” No! None of us did. And if you’re wondering what 4:3 is, it’s when the frame is not quite a square, AKA a ratio of 4 units to 3 units. Often we think of movies being wide-screen. 4:3 suggests, “What if a movie was a weird box?” Kelly Reichardt uses a lot of 4:3. Zack Snyder’s Justice League is in 4:3. Classics all around.
Here is Maestro noticing his future wife. Who’s at the piano with him? Could be anyone — Maestro, like all bisexual men, was always surrounded by women.
Here’s where I have to admit I had a bit of a headstart with a tip from the Fran Magazine inner circle that the teaser would be dropping yesterday. Here’s what I learned:
Now, we have to discuss this in a serious sort of way: Cooper has a prosthetic nose and he is definitely doing “Maestro” (aka “Jewish” aka “native New York”) voice. Cooper is of Irish-Italian descent, so like Anne Hathaway and Mrs. Maisel before him, he is appropriating Jewish culture. First, the voice. The voice is good! It doesn’t really sound like Bernstein (of which you can listen to all sorts of examples), but he does have that cigarette and whiskey-soaked affectation of a mid-century person. It’s a very silky, lush voice. I think, like Cooper’s Jackson Maine voice (insane), it’s very beautiful!
And then, of course… there is the nose. Looking at his face with the prosthetic head-on is jarring and deeply strange. A lot of people are now wondering: Is Bradley Cooper allowed to do this? That’s not a question I find very interesting. Mostly I wish Jake Gyllenhaal, who vied to play Bernstein for years, would star in a separate Maestro biopic that could go to bat against Maestro — we need more of two of the same movie going head-to-head so we can compare them. What Cooper is doing exists in a long line of unimaginative makeup/prosthetic-based facsimile in film and television due, in part, to the limited imagination of viewers and artists alike. “Oh, he doesn’t really look like him,” whatever. It’s also very clearly not just the nose. There is something going on with his forehead/eyebrows, and I suspect prosthetic ears too. He is trying to be Maestro; he is not trying to be what Macklemore was doing that one time. I think the broad trend of judging a piece of work by its adherence to a system of ever-shifting ethics spells out nothing good for the continuation of art, but that’s just me and I don’t have a full-time job. Cooper is probably so happy about the strike because it means he won’t have to answer questions about the nose. All I can think to say about it is what I have already more or less stated earlier, which is that Cooper is very Hollywood (which we know from the recent strikes and not, say, the IATSE strike last year that was not chic or meme-able to discuss) is bad, but Hollywood is also insane and artful, and this, to me, is more worthy of attention and a keen eye and open heart than an algorithmic, manufactured four quadrant whatever. I have half a mind that Maestro will skip over Bernstein’s relationship with Israel, so you should at the very least redirect your attention to Helen Mirren’s nose in Golda.
Here’s a great shot, the moment I knew the movie was going to be an instant classic, which is Mrs. Maestro in the shadow of Maestro conducting. You might wondering: what is that piece of music playing in the background of the trailer? Is that an original Maestro composition? No, that is the fourth movement of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, a piece of classical music that appears in both last year’s TÁR and Decision to Leave. In TÁR, the titular Lydia Tár strives to complete a Mahler cycle, aka record all of the Mahler symphonies with only the Fifth remaining. Bernstein actually accomplished this not once but twice!
“Color is subjective, black and white is objective” — Christopher Nolan, on Maestro.
Here’s when the trailer gets so crazy. Cooper as Bernstein as Old Maestro… the make-up, prosthetics, and (likely) CGI make for a very convincing old man face. Here is where I think the nose is much less egregious, possibly because there is a whole other set of face prosthetics to go with it. As someone who frequently as a child watched the documentary where Bernstein records the soundtrack to West Side Story, this is looking quite good, quite convincing. I don’t think this is exactly what’s going on in this shot, but it’s close enough to justify putting the video here.
Maestro old wife.
Maestro being bisexual.
Maestro’s wife being biphobic. :(
Bernstein’s relationships with men were both secret and not, the way a lot of homosexuality was practiced in the middle part of the 20th century. Did Mrs. Maestro grow to accept him? You will have to see Maestro in theaters or on Netflix in order to learn that. Let’s just say… “it’s complicated.” Mark Bridges did costuming for Maestro. Bridges also did other well-costumed movies like basically every Paul Thomas Anderson movies (Phantom Thread especially, duh) and also Joker, which Cooper produced. When watching the trailer, I thought: “This is going to get a COSTUME award.”
Whenever Maestro and his wife were having marital difficulties — on account of him being bisexual or because he was kind of an intense guy — she would take the kids and go to South America or Fran Magazine correction: their Connecticut house. This pool — initially thought to be set in South America — is actually in Connecticut. You can read more about this house here. Regardless of location, you can tell she is stressed about bisexuality, because characters only go into pools fully clothed in movies when they are stressed about something, often relating to bisexuality.
Okay, nothing to really say about this other than I’m going to get a lot of traction responding to texts with it for the next six months.
It is crazy to know that the images that made up “A Sweet Sip for Maestro” now belong to a callback within the film.
You see a shot in a trailer like this, and you think: now there’s a man who just had or is about to have a hibiscus iced tea or whatever.
There it is: Netflix’s Bradley Cooper’s Maestro. I saw this and I thought, is this the same font he did A Star Is Born in?
The answer is: no, Maestro has a serif font to connote that it’s set in the past. But you can see why I might think this.
A Bradley Cooper Film. Has anything ever been more true? Compare that to:
We’ve leveled up. Okay, I have to wind this down because I’m scared everyone is going to get mad at me about what I said about the nose (literally look at my own face and tell me that I don’t get to weigh in on “nose discourse,” though; can you imagine what it was like for me to live through the heyday of Bat Mitzvah nose job gifts? Also: I didn’t take a screenshot of it, but this movie is produced by both Scorsese and Spielberg, which means at least one notable Jewish person has been like, “You know what… whatever”). But I want to draw attention to one last thing.
It is notable, and quite sweet and also a little funny, I think, that Cooper has ended both trailers for his movies with his character’s arm around a woman.
Focusing Maestro on the relationship between Bernstein and Felicia, with music as both texture and color, will probably function in the same way it did in A Star Is Born, which is to say, really well. He is marketing himself less as a filmmaker who does “music movies” and more as a guy who makes romantic movies for adults. This is Cooper’s greatest trait as a filmmaker, and whether you enjoy or do not enjoy A Star Is Born, I think we can agree that that movie is often painful because of how romantic it is in its early scenes.
Okay, that’s the Fran Magazine Maestro trailer explainer. Eventually a publication is going to need someone who has read like 1,000 pages about Bernstein to write for them and they will inevitably give that assignment to someone who has read the Wikipedia page. So consider Fran Magazine the most trusted, up-to-date source on the specific insanity that is Maestro: A Bradley Cooper film.
Cold War (2018) also 4:3!
I fully forgot about the Macklemore thing.........