Maestro (2023) - Movie Review

Bradley Cooper is one of my favourite people working in Hollywood right now. As an actor, he just got done completing the heartbreaking character arc of a talking raccoon and solidifying him as one of the greatest modern superheroes with Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3. As a producer, he backed another whopper of a comic book flick with Joker, a film I still hold in rather high regard and am beyond curious to see what in the hell the sequel is going to shape into. And as a director, his debut with A Star Is Born was a monster hit when it came out, and one of my faves from that year. The man just keeps making power moves, and always with this unmistakable confidence that, no matter what direction he takes, it’s the right one for him.

It's the kind of quality that makes him helming a film like this (or, more specifically, why Steven Spielberg would emphatically insist that he helm it) make total sense, and something of a necessity in order to do it right. While I freely admit that I don’t know all that much about Leonard Bernstein, the legend around his name carries a lot of weight, and with the take that’s being attempted here, there’s a incredibly high degree of difficulty in making it work.

Cooper as Lenny himself is absolutely phenomenal. Even going into this as a fan of his work on-screen, I wasn’t in any way prepared for just how completely he would melt into the character here. His motormouth antics in the more talky scenes, his impassioned movements when he’s dancing, conducting, or playing drums on another man’s arse, the sheer sense of joy that exudes from his every moment of pure existence; this is stunning through and through.

Carey Mulligan as Lenny’s wife Felicia holds her own too, arguably upstaging Cooper at times. She keeps up with the dialogue beautifully, her chemistry with Cooper is so natural as to seem entirely effortless, and the way she navigates her character arc about the practicalities of being in a relationship with someone like Lenny manages half of what is ultimately a genuinely impressive dramatic feat. Seeing her verbally tear him a new arsehole as a giant Snoopy parade balloon drifts past the window was pretty sweet too.

And on the note of the staging, the confidence Cooper floods every room with in front of the camera is shared by the guy running the camera in DP Matthew Libatique. There are quite a few one-ers in this film, both to highlight dialogue and showing Bernstein as a conductor, which give Cooper, Mulligan, and every other actor here a chance to show off their respective abilities in performance, as well as showing that his knack for directing actors as shown in A Star Is Born wasn’t a fluke. The quality of the footage is all kinds of gorgeous on top of that, from the black-and-white stock used for earlier scenes to the warm and vibrant colours of the later moments.

As for the depiction of Bernstein as a person, given this is mainly a biopic, this isn’t as fixated on marking the major points of his musical career. The narrative path laid out by Cooper and co-writer Josh Singer follows suit with films like Ridley Scott’s Napoleon in how the famous person's relationship with their One True Love is the central focus. That approach helps to avoid the strained attempts to be comprehensive that biopics have a nasty habit of falling into, and the exploration of Bernstein's sexuality is honestly kind of refreshing. It hints at him being bisexual (mostly male suitors on-screen, yet mentions of being with women aside from Felicia show up every so often), but is ultimately more concerned about the matter of affairs than who they are with. Now, the way the film frames this is where that degree of difficulty I mentioned before comes in. The idea that a guy sleeps around because his love for people is so vast that it simply can’t be contained by a single partner… honestly, on paper, it sounds like the single most pretentious handwave of infidelity there is.

And yet it works here. Because the performances are so organic and invigorating, and because the writing and direction frame the characters in such a palpably earnest light (but without becoming cloying in the process), the film’s depiction of Bernstein as a man of love first and foremost rings true. It sets itself up as teasing questions out of the story rather than directly answering any, along with a recurring spoken leitmotif about people being more than one thing, and it effectively wields that in its depiction of Bernstein as a person. A man who has a deep and abiding love for his wife and spent a lot of time in other people’s beds. An introvert living in fear of the scrutiny of being publicly out and an extrovert who lives for entertaining the masses. A person who is a living contradiction, but whose greatest defining feature is just how much love he has in his heart for everything. The people around him, the work he does, and the legacy he leaves behind.

For as many biopics as I’ve covered on here, I can scarcely think of one that left me with such an open-hearted impression of the person being highlighted. When it gets to Bernstein's performance at Ely Cathedral, and he tearfully embraces Felicia afterwards, it felt like I was witnessing the most pure ideal of love that can possibly exist. Like, this does for polyamory what Secretary and Sanctuary do for BDSM: Gives it a disarmingly wholesome perspective which makes a good case for destigmatising it as normal sexual expression.

Again, knowing very little about Leonard Bernstein beforehand, I can’t speak to this film’s accuracy and/or worth as a strict biopic. But as a character study and love story, this is in its own class.