Bradley Cooper stars in his own film about the great conductor-composer, but it's Carey Mulligan, as Bernstein's wife Felicia, who walks away with the film.
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Among others, 'On the Waterfront' (1954) is a glove story. Walking near the river on a cold day, Eva Marie Saint drops a glove. Marlon Brando he takes it and wears it. He unwraps a piece of gum. After a while, she removes the glove from his hand. Contact is made. He goes and stands next to an iron railing. He says, "You don't remember me, do you?" Just before he answers, we hear music: a woodwind solo, with the clarinet leading the way. "I remembered you the first moment I saw you," he says. Strings join the woodwinds. Brando chews gum, walks away, turns around and beckons shouting "Come on".
The music, subtle but with romantic encouragement, is his Leonard Bernstein. It is the only score he wrote directly for films. I wish he had written more. (“On the Town” and “West Side Story” burst out of the theater and, for many listeners, lost a jolt of energy when they reached the screen.) In fact, given his influence in so many realms of American culture—as a composer, a conductor, a lecturer, a television host, a writer, a New Yorker, and an activist—it's surprising how faint a mark Bernstein left on film. Perhaps he feared, with good reason, that the compromises involved in filmmaking were even more painful than those imposed elsewhere. His most insightful contribution may be "What a Movie!", a mezzo-soprano number he composed for the 1952 opera "Trouble in Tahiti," in which the heroine, Dina, mocks a movie she has just seen ("What escapist Technicolor twaddle”), only to be drawn, in spite of herself, into the tropical fantasies he was giving.
Now we have “Maestro,” a new Bernstein biopic. It is directed by Bradley Cooper, who wrote the screenplay with Josh Singer and, to triple the fun, takes on the role of Bernstein. The film covers miles of chronological ground. We begin with the elderly Bernstein, virile, bleached and armed with the tools he cannot exist without: a piano and a cigarette. (Warning: The smoking in this film will take your breath away. Bernstein even smokes in a doctor's waiting room.) We then return to his twenty-five-year-old self when he is awakened by a phone call on November 14, 1943, during to which he is informed that, ugh, Bruno Walter is ill and that Bernstein, with only a few hours' notice and no rehearsal, is to conduct the New York Philharmonic.
Suddenly, we're in an action movie. Bernstein jumps up, throws open the curtains, throws his arms wide, and lets out a roar of lingering delight, like Tarzan greeting a bright new day in the jungle. You almost expect him to hit his chest. The camera then follows him as he runs out of the room, down a corridor and onto the balcony of Carnegie Hall, where the evening concert will take place. In short, Cooper, with a courageous method, knocks his hero straight from the bed into the auditorium – two arenas, according to this film, in which he could never resist the lure.
Another flourish, at a sunny outdoor lunch: Bernstein sits next to an actress, Felicia Montealegre Cohn (Carey Mulligan), whom he adores and will later marry. At the head of the table is the Russian-born conductor Serge Koussevitzky (Yasen Peyankov), who advises Bernstein, as a fellow Jew, to cut his name to the more acceptable Burns, and says he could become "the first great American conductor ». Bernstein promises to give up "that musical theater stuff." Felicia, however, wants to hear it, so he grabs her hand and the two rudely run away, magically reaching a stage where "Fancy Free," the 1944 Jerome Robbins ballet, with music by Bernstein, the work that swells into “On the Town” — is performed. Somehow, the two intruders get caught up in it. If you've ever dreamed of seeing Bradley Cooper in a sailor suit with a matching little hat, here's your chance.
For all the reckless glee in that scene, there's also a chill of awe as Felicia is instead pushed toward her lover rather than pushed away. And there, in essence, you have the “Maestro”. It's a dance of passion – a labor of love, on Cooper's part, as well as a demonstration of the inimical fact that love can be hard work. Felicia is well aware when she marries Bernstein that he is bisexual; what she fails to anticipate is how polygamous he is. "I love so much, what can I say?" he declares, in proud and happy apology, and the film surveys the area of explosion around his unimaginable person. He can no more tolerate the joy of his desire than he can curtail the universality of his musical tastes, and, for better or for worse, other souls feel the brunt. We see the older Bernstein, in Tanglewood, at a young student's Beethoven school, then caress him with the powerful chant of "Shout," by Tears for Fears. And we wonder as Bernstein reassures his eldest daughter, Jamie, played by Maya Hawke, that the rumors of his gay antics are only fueled by jealousy. To be fair, he is acting on Felicia's instructions: "Don't you dare tell her the truth."
Here are some things that 'Maestro' doesn't deal with. First, Bernstein's childhood and adolescence. (Except for an Oedipal confession: "I had dreams where I was killing my father.") Second, his politics. No attempt is made, thank goodness, to dramatize the party Felicia threw at their Park Avenue apartment in 1970 to raise funds for the defense of the imprisoned Black Panthers, sparking Tom Wolfe's incendiary accusations of "radical chic". Third, Bernstein's Judaism, which led him to conduct the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, later the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, in Beersheba in 1948, when so many troops gathered for his concert of Mozart, Beethoven and Gershwin that Egyptian airplanes , above, reported a military maneuver. Fourth, his pedagogy, which in retrospect appears to be central, rather than unrelated, to his achievement. No one has perfected, with less pressure, the art of speaking neither up nor down, but directly in an audience, under the relentless gaze of television cameras, while sorting out a confusing subject. In last year's 'Tár', when the disgraced heroine sought consolation from Bernstein, she heard neither an LP nor a CD. He chose one of his Youth Concerts, on an old videotape.
Strange to say, "Maestro" isn't really about the music. (Neither the “Tár"). The whole thing may be steeped in music, but Cooper is inspired less by the creative source of the sound than by the emotional destination to which it flows – namely Felicia. We attend Bernstein's performance of Mahler's Second Symphony, for example, in Ely Cathedral, England. The scene is based on a taped archive of the event, from 1973, and Cooper closely mimics Bernstein's frenzied gestures at the podium, but notice what happens after the final chord crashes: the camera pans to Felicia's spellbound face as watches from the main corridor. Something similar happens, in a lower and more sinister key, at the premiere of Bernstein's “Mass,” where, instead of conducting, he sits on the balcony between his latest lover, Tommy Cothran (Gideon Glick), and Felicia. She glances at the entwined hands of the men, in the semi-darkness, and sees love slipping from her hands.
Felicia is the last character we see in “Maestro”, and the first actor's name in the end credits is that of Carey Mulligan. She is her movie, and Cooper, to be fair, knows it. How she can manifest such sweetness of nature without a hint of salt is beyond me. "You don't even know how much you need me, do you?" Felicia tells Bernstein as they lie down and stay on the floor after making love. I spy a ghost of Julie Andrews in Mulligan's smile, both indulgent and vivacious, and what stands out about Felicia is the perfect ratio of a rose to a thorn. Hence the film's best sequence, which is shot in one take, with no music and no camera movement. Mr. and Mrs. Bernstein talk, just the two of them, in a room overlooking Central Park West, during a Thanksgiving Day parade. The debate hardens into argument and then rage. "If you're not careful, you'll die like a lonely old queen," Felicia shouts. Behind them, through the window, we see a huge floating Snoopy head. Inside the Pax Americana, here is war.
In the movie exists a death, but which I will not reveal. Suffice it to say, some viewers will have to be removed from the cinema floor after this. The looming pain is sharpened and soothed not by Mozart or Mahler, but by the sight of Bernstein's children lingering over Shirley Ellis's "The Clapping Song." This is where the 'Maestro' scores. Rejecting a fruitless bid for completeness, Cooper has devised something as restless and as persistent as his subject. (“I always barely keep up with myself,” Bernstein once said.) We go back and forth, from the stark bite of black-and-white, for the dawn of Bernstein's fame, to the richly ironic glow of color in Later, his older and less contented years; from the frenzied bliss of ambition to a kind of exhausted serenity. And, if Leonard Bernstein never did get to star as Tchaikovsky in a Hollywood biopic opposite Greta Garbo as the composer's patron – a project seriously mooted in 1945 – then let's not mourn too much. The guy had other things to do.
♦ Published in its print edition issue of November 27, 2023 , entitled "Inappropriate Conduct".
*Cover photo: Bradley Cooper's Leonard Bernstein biopic stars Cooper as Bernstein and Carey Mulligan as his long-suffering wife, Felicia. Illustration by Leonie Bos
Of Anthony Lane
Source: new yorker