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Maestro moment
Regular — and perhaps even irregular! — readers of Fran Magazine know that I have been breathlessly awaiting the sophomore feature of “director Bradley Cooper” entitled Maestro, a movie about Leonard Bernstein.
The passion for Maestro predates: the 61st New York Film Festival where the movie is playing, the trailer for Maestro and the Maestro nose controversy, when Maestro was paparazzi’d enjoying an iced pink drink, 2018’s A Star is Born — Cooper’s directorial debut — and goes all the way back, I think, to the Maestro rights wars of 2015-2016 when both Cooper and Jake Gyllenhaal were somewhat publicly vying for the role of Leonard Bernstein. Maestro is a culmination of one insane guy from my youth (Bradley Cooper who I knew from being the only character who doesn’t have a gun on Alias) playing another insane guy from my youth (Leonard Bernstein, whose Young People’s Concerts were a staple of my high school music education). It was my most anticipated film of the year.
I was supposed to see Maestro yesterday at the lovely Walter Reade theater where I see almost all of the NYFF press screenings, but at the last minute, a friend of the magazine was able to get me into one of the public screenings on Monday night, at the “newly renovated”1 David Geffen Hall which is where the New York Philharmonic plays.2 Pal and filmmaker Caroline Golum joined me and we sat in the first tier waiting with bated breath… for Maestro to take the screen.
I really loved Maestro. It is within my power and best interest to discuss the film without spoilers as much as possible — it’s hard with a historical figure because if you want to know what happens to Leonard Bernstein and those closest to him, the annals of history and Wikipedia are right there for you. Like Cooper’s remake of A Star is Born, Maestro is an idiosyncratic and frequently surprising film, equal parts silly and insane, oscillating between the sublime and the ordinary. Like A Star is Born, if I consider Maestro as a summation of parts — scenes, lines, etc. — I am left with at least half a dozen (or most likely a full dozen) instances of being like, “huh? what? okay?” Like his previous venture, Cooper is doing an insane voice and believes he is elevating his female co-star above himself (he’s not). And so too like his last film, the movie stumbles through its second hour — pacing askew, feeling as though it must cross some t’s and dot some i’s — though it hits far higher highs and ends, I believe, quite touchingly. I laughed a lot. I cried once. The cumulative effect of the Maestro is audacious and moving. For too long we have valued filmmakers who are geniuses. It is time to return to valuing filmmakers who are well-meaning lunatics, risk-takers, or romantics. Lucky for us, Cooper is all three.
It is, perhaps, the nature of the film’s well-meaningness that sits poorly with other critics, many of whom seem to dislike the film for a number of reasons, including, but not limited to:
too boring & rote
too insane & illogical
too well-meaning
not well-meaning enough3
But it is the point of the film’s bounty or lack of well-meaningness that I’ve returned to time and time again in the 36 hours since seeing Maestro. That the Bernstein family has been front and center in the film’s promotion this fall is certainly a point of interest for a number of reasons. Due to the ongoing SAG strike, Cooper — who directed as well as starred — isn’t really capable of doing the kind of press he’d probably like to be doing, though he also seemingly hates talking to press (especially when he can just talk on the Jason Bateman podcast). The Bernstein children have taken him under their wing, stepping out from behind the family legacy to assure audiences that yes, Lenny did have a big beautiful nose, and yes, this is a portrait of their family — warts and all — that they know and love.
The conflict that stands at the heart of Maestro is what it means, not to be funny, to be “maestro”: to have a public title that comes with a kind of separation between public and private life, between conductor and composer, between popular music and classical music, between heterosexual marriage and homosexual affairs. It is a movie that is less a “biopic” — the film neither begins with Leonard Bernstein’s birth nor end with his death — and more an exploration of celebrity. We do not see Maestro struggle to do his job. We see Maestro struggle to be in the world. It is tricky to do this kind of thing without a kind of generosity because when it comes to celebrities that people did mostly , like, genuinely like when he was alive — that’s Bernstein. To create a piece of work that is determined to tear down the legacy seems counterintuitive to the point of Cooper’s art. If you thought Jackson Maine was the villain, what movie were you watching?
In 1966, the composer John Adams4 wrote a letter to Bernstein about which he said: “Still in my freshman year, and by way of venting my frustration with the direction contemporary music was heading, I wrote a letter to Leonard Bernstein. I had never met him, but for some reason I felt the need to prick such a famous superstar to see if he might possibly bleed.”
To his surprise, Bernstein wrote back the following:
Dear Mr. Adams,
I am touched by your intelligent letter, but hard put to answer it. When you depict me as “turning my back” on “new” musical trends you do me a disservice, to say nothing of making an irrelevancy. One writers what one hears within one, not without. Lord knows I am sufficiently exposed to the “influence” of non-tonal music; but obviously I have not been conditioned by them. Mahler apart, I cannot conceive music (my own music) divorced from tonality. Whether this is good or bad is, again, irrelevant. The only meaningful thing is the truth of the creative act. The rest of the chips will fall where they may.
Good luck to you.
That Bernstein wrote back to Adams to be like, “hey man, I can really only do what I am capable of doing, but best of luck to you, you weird freak” feels like an access code for Cooper’s oeuvre as well. As I wrote upon the release of the Maestro trailer, there is nothing that motivates the artistic work of Bradley Cooper (Joker executive producer credit notwithstanding…) more than love. He loves love in a REAL way, the way high schoolers and other celebrities do, and this is what he is capable of generating on-screen. Either you give yourself over to it, or you resist it entirely. Tone, quality — these matter, of course, and the film plays fast and loose with both depending on whether it is delivering quick, sharp expository dialogue or tumbling into a larger-than-life fantasy — but these don’t matter as much as gesturing with love. In the Netflix-approved anecdote about Cooper as director presented by a NY Phil higher up ahead of the movie, Cooper spent 2018 and 2019 regularly attending the philharmonic5, learning how an orchestra functions and moves, often texting day-of concerts to see if there were extra seats. He would come down for the second act, which is usually the “main” piece of the night, only after — wait for it — putting his daughter to bed before schlepping up town. I both believe this as true and false, knowing it is a public relations movie — a good family man has made a movie about a complicated but good family man — and an act of generosity towards his own daughter, a premature attempt to cement a legacy in place: That his work did not take precedence over her, that being Maestro (Cooper) was not more important than bedtime. It is easy to find cynicism in that kind of thing, but it is also easy to listen to Mahler at a quiet-to-normal volume and think nothing of it.
The love story between Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre was complicated and inexplicable — married with three children, though his affairs were more or less permitted if discreet, which they often were not. She tolerated them, until she didn’t, but then did again. What they saw each other remains a mystery. That’s not to say they had no reason to be together, or they were not likable people in and of themselves, or that Maestro makes the case that, say, they never should have been together. It’s just that Cooper knows their love is as mysterious and intangible as any love of quality. You can only explain so much of it; the rest you have to feel. Watching Cooper and Mulligan on screen together is often thrilling — two evenly-matched, big choice-making, mid-Atlantic accent swinging actors, going tête-à-tête for two hours. Like with Cooper and Gaga, there is just a likable magnetism to them as a couple, a pair. Cooper knows the tragedy of Bernstein’s life was that he only got a finite amount in his marriage, which he often rued the existence of. The legacy of Felicia Montealgre is — for better and worse — tied with the legacy of Bernstein. She rarely exists on her own in the context of history. Mercifully, Cooper often lets her sit in the center of the frame, the whole of it Mulligan’s little face. It does not set the record one way or another; it is just a tone, or a half-step, away from how it was, but at least it is a shift.
A few asides: Maestro plays respect to the legacy of Bernstein’s work for Broadway, less West Side Story and more On The Town (good — I’ve had enough of the former). Jeremy Strong is not in it, but Gideon Glick is. Maestro says something insane to a baby. When he looks up in all the prosthetic old make-up, it’s crazy to see Cooper’s eyes under there, sort of like when Heath Ledger played the Joker. Every ten minutes, I leaned back and muttered, “jesus christ.” Similarly, on three or four occasions, Caroline reached back (on the upper tiers of the newly renovated David Geffen Hall, people sit almost diagonally and single-file) to whack me on the arm. Cooper conducts with gusto, unashamed. As we walked out of the theater, I noted how unselfconscious Cooper always appears to be for a guy who can clearly not think about anything other than himself, and Caroline said something to the effect of, “well, that’s Hollywood.” This is the magic trick of very old-fashioned filmmaking — Gene Kelly swallowing the cigarette in The Pirate, Taylor Swift drunk dancing at the VMAs type of stuff. Does it matter that it’s a lie? I don’t know — it’s a pretty one good, if you’re willing to hear it out.
Maybe I was moved by Maestro because I love Bernstein too much to have enough distance, and perhaps because it’s so clear how much Cooper loves him too. He loves him so much that he doubles down on the suffering as the film winds down — a bit too brutal, we get it, people get old and rarely does life get better from there. I think Cooper stumbles in the second hour of his films because it pains him to make that turn. He does not want these characters to suffer, and in trying to give them the proper amount of human suffering, he doesn’t know how not to overdo it. Thankfully, he is buoyed by Mahler — the saving grace of yet another NYFF movie — and Cooper has the patience and heart to let the music speak when and where words otherwise fail him. He did this in A Star is Born too.
When I was reading the big book of Bernstein letters earlier this year, I was struck by how that book, too, fumbles the twilight years of Bernstein’s life. Though the truth that book’s weakness is much more unfortunate: after the death of his wife, Bernstein did not have many people to write to anymore. He exchanges bitchy gossip notes with Stephen Sondheim, checks in on Marin Alsop, says hi to Yo-Yo Ma, whatever. But he does not confide, he does not laugh, he does not tell winding, intimate stories or go deep or long on music. That part of him is sealed up, resting now in Greenwood Cemetery, where we were told Cooper went to put stones on the grave. Maestro is not filling in many blinds spots, nor is it reinventing the wheel. Rather it is like turning on a light in a dark room, or flipping open a familiar book — there is a staggering sense of deja vu, a bizarre grappling with time and space. It was one thing in A Star is Born to watch Cooper parse through a story of the past set in present time, and another thing in Maestro to watch him parse through the present through a story set in the past. He too is somewhat unstuck in time; I suspect it won’t all make sense to us until we, too, find ourselves running out of it.
Last year was its official reopening as the newly renovated space, but they outfitted the concert hall with Dolby sound specifically for the Maestro premiere, so in a sense, it is once again… newly renovated.
I am, in fact, seeing them tomorrow.
I am fascinated by a Letterboxd review by someone I don’t know who says that if the goal of the movie was to make them hate Leonard Bernstein, then it succeeded. I don’t think that was the goal!
In the NOT YET RENOVATED David Geffen Hall.
I can't wait for the "Maestro says something insane to a baby" moment
Enjoyed this review the first time, but it was even more insightful and illuminating now that I’ve seen all that is 2023’s MAESTRO. Best thing I can say is that it helped the movie gel in my mind and made me love it even more!
The baby thing is truly insane, but the real crazy-in-a-(probably)-positive-way thing for me involved a certain Charlie Brown character. Only Cooper!