Few films are as well-acted, well-shot, well-written—as all-around excellent—as “Maestro,” which Bradley Cooper wrote, directed, and starred in. The movie, which was released on Netflix after a limited run in theaters, charts the life of Leonard Bernstein and his relationship with his wife, Felicia Montealegre. It’s a refreshing and much-needed take on the rote biopic formula.
America has been home to few, if any, greater musicians than Bernstein. “Maestro” opens with his ascension to fame: a phone call telling him he’ll be conducting a radio-broadcasted New York Philharmonic performance in a few hours, without any time to rehearse with the orchestra. Bernstein walks onto Carnegie Hall’s stage that day but into the international spotlight. Orchestras around the world began asking him to be a guest conductor. Then, he begins composing large-scale works, and soon becomes known as a renowned composer and conductor.
But the principal focus of “Maestro” isn’t Bernstein’s musical career. The soul of the movie is, instead, his marriage to Chilean actress Montealegre (played by a brilliantly sensitive Carey Mulligan). Mulligan and Cooper’s chemistry elevates their scenes together. It’s in these scenes—which make up close to a majority of the movie—that the movie finds its heart. “I wanted to dedicate the real estate of the film to them,” Cooper . “How could I serve the truth of his life within this marriage while not shifting the focus away from them?”
And the movie does feel like it’s hit something true—if not about Bernstein’s life and marriage, then about humanity. It’s about love in all its forms, pure and sloppy. Talking and fighting and kissing and cheating and yearning and hiding and loving. Bernstein and Montealegre had an open marriage, and we watch them drift in and out of their own relationship and their relationships with other people. Their relationship status at any given minute defines the underlying emotion of the movie. Anything musical takes a backseat to their relational push and pull.
“A work of art does not answer questions, it provides them,” Bernstein says early in the film. “And its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.” “Maestro” takes that quote and uses it to construct a film as true-to-life as it is unique. It takes liberties other “biopics” (although I hesitate to give “Maestro” that label) wouldn’t. Bernstein runs out of his room and into Carnegie Hall in the first five minutes of the movie, wearing only a bathrobe and underwear. A surreal dance scene in the film’s first half both roughly summarizes the plot and visually expresses its tension. Bernstein’s passion for art gave the film’s creators the license to make “Maestro” more than rote. It’s one of the best biopics I’ve seen.
Near its end, Cooper conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s “Resurrection Symphony.” This was six minutes of frantic, wonderful conducting. Cooper nails Bernstein’s full-body engagement (Bernstein once “I need to conduct with every part of my body, with my shoulders, with my wrists, with my knees”), and the scene is a capstone on a movie that’s no less than incredible.
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