Bradley Cooper Delivers the Performance ‘Maestro’ Deserves

Magnificent in great measure to its force-of-will writer/director/producer/star, Bradley Cooper’s virtuosic romance Maestro suffers from a minor strain of too-studiedness. At its core, this voluptuous homage to the bumpy marriage between protean celebrity conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) and his actress wife Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) only bears consensus-choice revelations about the private moments of a very public life. It’s an absolutely ravishing portrayal of a very hoary trope: the charming but closeted husband, tortured by his bisexual identity, and the long-suffering wife, an angel to her dying breath and a martyr for her betrothed’s excesses.

MAESTRO ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Bradley Cooper
Written by: Bradley Cooper, Josh Singer
Starring: Carey Mulligan, Bradley Cooper, Matt Boemer, Sarah Silverman, Maya Hawke
Running time: 129 mins

This high-profile project, over a decade in development, bears the imprimatur of co-producing gatekeepers Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg—who at various times planned to direct it—along with the overt participation/approval of Bernstein’s three children. How do you navigate the mine fields of those creative minds without offending anyone’s sensibilities? How can you cut to the core of a character without trip-wiring so many strong-willed guardians? You let it be: the approved-by-committee marital dynamic is fixed. Expect clandestine homosexual assignations and a spouse’s trembling-lipped emotional devastation.

Knowing that there’s a limit to how deep he’s allowed to go into his subjects, Cooper simply concentrates on excavating those taut emotions while evoking the astounding talent of the much-beloved Bernstein. And that’s where Cooper’s multi-hyphenate abilities come to bear. This is an actor’s story to tell, a portrayal of two human beings who put a brave face on their very real pain and pretend that they are something other than their anguish.

From the moment the two twentysomethings meet, at one of those sophisticated soirées where people like Betty Comden and Adolph Green swan and ham in equal measure, there’s an odd but compelling dynamic at play. Lenny, the Massachusetts-born son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, and Felicia, a Latin American on her mother’s side, born in Costa Rica and educated in Chile, both talk with the most preposterous WASP mid-Atlantic accents.

Lenny’s lock-jaw logorrhea is especially acute, spitting out nervous-tic “dah-lings” like a Park Avenue native with Tourette’s. It’d be a snob-off, except that they’re both so clearly sharp-minded and silver tongued. Lenny and Felicia are formidable strivers—he in the music world and she in the theater—and quickly become kindred spirits. But they also seem to radiate a Gatsbyesque sense of self-invention that embraces New York’s upper-strata society circles with vigor. They are not where they came from; they are whomever they will themselves to be. And certainly, with Lenny, the world had never seen anyone quite like him.

Maestro charts the A-to-Z moments of Lenny’s professional career, from his 1943 star-making conductor substitution as a 25-year-old singleton on the stage of Carnegie Hall through to his late-1980s geriatric-widower masterclasses at Tanglewood. But it’s his relationship with Felicia that drives the film and reveals the more-is-more man behind the musician for whom discretion was definitely not the better part of valor. “Him? Never,” says Lenny’s sister Shirley (Sarah Silverman) with a weary laugh. What exactly does Lenny want? “I want a lot of things,” he explains, dripping with understatement.

Cooper encourages expert cinematographer Matthew Libatique to lean into the film’s expressionism, not so much heightening the obvious as reveling in it. Lenny’s penchant for men first appears in the dark—specifically a curtain-drawn bedroom the morning he gets that fateful call to fill in that night and lead the New York Philharmonic. And, once he consummates his relationship with Felicia and it’s obvious that she’ll have to defer her career for his, there’s a shot of her, offstage, watching him perform—literally standing in his shadow.

And yet the film so deliciously blends the bold with the nuanced. One startling moment of revelation happens on Central Park West, when Lenny bumps into two of his former lovers, a man and woman now married and pushing their baby in a stroller. He robustly tells the child that he slept with both parents. “I love too much,” he beams. “But I’m reining it in!” That last part Cooper delivers with almost psychotic relish, brilliantly encapsulating Lenny’s conflicted joy and pain; his need to confess the sour absurdity of his double life.

He loves Felicia, but he also loves life and music and beauty and men and chain smoking and domestic life and fatherhood and adoration and teaching and writing Broadway shows and classical composers and everything. Lenny’s life is rhapsodic, but it would be untethered without Felicia, and they both know it. Not for nothing does the film’s astounding centerpiece, a gauntlet-thrown ultimatum argument between the two of them, set in their bedroom and captured in an uninflected single master shot, take place as the Thanksgiving Day parade marches past their window. Lenny is ballooning while Felicia struggles to keep him grounded.

She’s the real reason he’s presentable, even dashing. “Fix your hair,” she snaps at one of their parties after he runs off to make out with a man. “You’re getting sloppy.” Without her, Lenny leans towards the garish. By the end, after he outlives her, we see him racing around Tanglewood, pushing 70, in a sports car with the vanity plate Maestro1 while his speakers blast Michael Stipe chant-yelling “Leo-nard Bern-stein” in R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” He’s a tacky mess, loose-shirted, pot-bellied and lusty. And lost.

He needs her, just as much as he needs music. Only with them in tandem can he thrive. Towards the end of the film, to drive home his point, Cooper has the audacity to pull off a jaw-dropping six-minute sequence where he recreates the 1973 concert at Ely Cathedral when Lenny conducts the London Symphony Orchestra as they perform Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, the “Resurrection Symphony.” The performances—Cooper’s sweat-drenched mimicry, the orchestra’s soul-tugging interpretation, Libatique’s lush camera movements—are sublime. It’s one of those rare moments in film where everything just syncs perfectly and communicates a vision with such clarity and urgency that the effect is both devastating and absolutely transcendent. Afterwards, Lenny and Felicia embrace. There’s no hate in your heart,” she admits in absolution. And—at least for a moment—all is forgiven.