What `Maestro' showed me about movies
Bradley Cooper's “Maestro,” based on the life of Leonard Bernstein, is a tour de force of high-end Hollywood filmmaking, expertly directed, persuasively acted, serious in its themes and seriously entertaining. Cooper as Bernstein and Carey Mulligan as his wife, Felicia Montealegre, are first-rate impersonators of real people, so much so that after a while I forgot about Cooper's fake Jewish nose.
What does genius owe to conformity, and to other people, when the force of creative energy drives an artist to extremes in work and in life? How does a prodigious artist's obligation to loved ones conflict with the demands of fame? Are some big-souled creators sacred monsters, or just egomaniacs intent on their own gratification? These are some of the questions raised by Cooper's portrait of Bernstein as a larger-thanlife composer and conductor — in the electrical as much as the musical sense — of powers greater than himself.
For Cooper the writer-director-actor, such a story poses the major challenge of portraying a person so recently famous that living people remember the real thing, and of representing him dramatically as a credible character and human being. Bernstein's personality, as portrayed here quite plausibly, was excessive in every way, and his omnisexual passions and volcanic artistic overflow empowered his creation and his performances while at the same time wreaking collateral damage on his marriage.
Well, that's an old story, told in countless ways through the ages. As a viewer I found myself a little overwhelmed and a little put off by the operatic excess of “Maestro,” however true to its subject. Of course, to distill a very eventful life into a two-hour narrative, a lot must be left out and the dramatic peaks highlighted, but I was exhausted just witnessing the musical, emotional and physical turmoil of the legendary maestro. I couldn't be sure if it was the character, the writing, the acting or the directing that was wearing me out, and didn't know who to blame for how battered I felt as I left the theater.
Apart from everything that had to be omitted — like the Bernsteins' “Radical Chic” politics as skewered in Tom Wolfe's New Yorker article of that title about a star-studded fundraising party for the Black Panthers hosted by the couple at their New York apartment — the grounding of the story in fact, also known as real life, and not so long ago, appears to have somehow forced the filmmaker into overstylizing the storytelling and maybe hyper dramatizing an already red-hot protagonist.
It reminded me of another movie I saw year before last, Todd Field's “Tár,” starring Cate Blanchett as an equally driven and difficult conductor who dazzles the world professionally and makes a mess of her personal life, leaving lots of casualties in her wake. Because “Tár” is fiction and therefore under no obligation to represent a real person, Blanchett's Lydia Tár is a far more nuanced and interesting character than Cooper's Lenny Bernstein. It is a paradox of creative imagination, and one of the pleasures of literature, that a fictional person can be truer to life than a real one.
As a movie, “Tár” so haunted me that I went back the next day to see it a second time and found it to be an even richer experience in its subtle details, its intelligent writing, its naturalistic ambiguity and painterly cinematography. As well made as “Maestro” was, I have no need or desire to see it again because I got it the first time, hammered by the scenery-chewing force of Cooper's over-the-top portrayal of Bernstein.
There is no shortage of troubled, melodramatic marriages in fact and in fiction, but for a tragic love story the 2018 Polish movie “Cold War,” a modest black-and-white tale of two lovers (also musicians) torn apart by geopolitics over 20 tumultuous years, in its intimacy, its understatement, its unspectacular stylistic simplicity and emotional agony, was for me far more moving than “Maestro.” Subtle is beautiful.