MAESTRO Doesn’t Know How To Conduct Itself
A review of Bradley Cooper’s passionate, yet strangely underwhelming second directorial effort.
“Any performer, whether it’s Toscanini or Tallulah Bankhead, whoever it is, leads a kind of public life. An extrovert life, if you will. It’s an oversimplified word, but something like that. Whereas a creative person sits alone in this great studio that you see here, and writes all by himself and… communicates with the world in a very private way and… and lives a rather… grand inner life, rather than a grand outer life.”
My apologies if I’m about to inadvertently repeat a phrase that other lukewarm reviews may have already used to describe this film, but as it’s a phrase which simply would not budge from my mind while I was watching it, I have no option but to say it:
Bradley Cooper’s Maestro is a curate’s egg.
But to describe it more aptly, it’s a Fabergé curate’s egg.
Beautifully made, crafted with immense care and precision, and an exquisite, glittering marvel to behold and appreciate for how rare something like this is in today’s proliferation of sincere artistry falling by the wayside of an irony-poisoned world…
…and yet, it feels just beyond one’s reach, an austere museum piece encased in glass behind a velvet rope; a showstopper of an object made for only a select few to fully love, but which most everyone else can only admire from afar, making it an experience that feels as hollow as the metaphorical egg itself.
Cooper’s acting and directorial talent aren’t in doubt here, for his excellent performance as Leonard Bernstein is inhabited like a second skin, while his directing skills are technically exemplary, be it with the Matthew Libatique-aided cinematographic visual splendour, or with his intuitive knack with drawing out the very best performances from all his actors. He’s exceedingly great at making everyone feel like their actions are spontaneous and casually naturalistic in subtle yet effective ways. He’s got that Altman-esque/Spielbergian style of overlapping dialogues, and that keen observational eye for small interruptions in the flow of characters talking as one or the other briefly acknowledges something before returning to their original train of thought. Small gestures of recognisable behaviour that accumulate into a rich tapestry of deeply humane portraits of how people interact with each other. The moment where Leonard and Felicia are lying on the floor, and he checks if she’s brushing fallen cigarette ashes off of his chest. Little things like that. Though my favourite detail of Cooper’s directing of actors that I first took note of in A Star Is Born, and which has carried over into Maestro, is him having characters ask each other to repeat themselves whenever one couldn’t clearly hear what the other was saying. It’s a small touch, but it adds so much for character verisimilitude, not to mention being hugely relatable to a chronic “sorry-can-you-repeat-that?” offender such as myself.
Regrettably, however, Cooper’s passion for his passion project didn’t translate into us as an audience feeling the same passion as he does. If you’re a hardcore theatre kid, or a major classical music aficionado, a biopic about Leonard Bernstein would likely already be right up your alley. But if you’re a normie like me, whose only real exposure to Bernstein beforehand is via West Side Story, there’s not much in Maestro that lets me in on who he was, and why he was so revered in the art worlds Bernstein was best known from. A lot of the film expositorily tells us about things Bernstein did, and things that happened to him, but we’re not really shown a whole lot of it for ourselves. Frequently, important moments in Leonard and Felicia’s lives are relegated to allusion or implication left offscreen, making us have to fill in the gaps intellectually, rather than being allowed to see and feel it emotionally. And yes, while Cooper, and especially Carey Mulligan, give us everything they’ve got with their performances that pack so much heart and pathos into every scene, the film barely lets us in to palpably feel it as strongly as we should. The camera often shoots everything wide and distant, rather than close and intimate. The structure of this retelling of their life together is peculiar and perfunctory, until we reach an ending that’s strangely abrupt and anticlimactic. Cooper loves these people, this story, this project so very much, dedicating years to train himself in conducting an orchestra to get it perfectly right, and do absolute justice to his subject whom he so admires… and still, somehow, not enough of that passion seeped into the fabric of Maestro to make us feel like we understand what made Bernstein special, as a person or an artist, nor does it elevate the film above the doldrums of your standard mediocre Oscar bait.
Carey Mulligan innocent, though. That top billing is her rightful place in all this, and without her, this film would be nothing.
(Side note: I have a dreadful prediction that sometime soon, either pre- or post-Oscars night, someone is going to clip the moment where Leonard screams into a cushion in intense anguish, sans context, and they’re going to tweet something to the effect of:
“Bradley Cooper when he loses his acting and directing and writing and Best Picture Oscars all to Oppenheimer.”
Doesn’t matter about the tactlessness of using that clip, and turning it into a jab at Cooper for a quick hit of virality now that the current trend is to hate on him. You just know someone’s going to do it, and it’ll get a ton of likes, and then backlash, and then backlash to the backlash, and then fizzle out into insignificance once there’s some new shiny object of hate to seize upon. Oh, joy. What fun that’s all going to be…)
Originally published January 10th 2024 at http://jackandersonkeane.substack.com.
