Maestro stars Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan as conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia Montealegre.
By Richard Ades
While waiting to see Maestro—Bradley Cooper’s take on the life of Leonard Berstein and his wife, Felicia Montealegre—I had a scary thought: What if it turned out to be another Being the Ricardos?
In that 2021 film, writer/director Aaron Sorkin focused so much on the marital woes of Lucille Ball and her husband, Desi Arnaz, that he all but ignored the comedic joy she brought to the world. So I worried: Would Cooper pull a Sorkin by focusing so much on Bernstein’s marital challenges that he’d ignore all the musical joy the composer/conductor created?
The good news is that Cooper, as the biopic’s director and co-writer (with Josh Singer), does leave ample room for Bernstein’s beautiful music. The bad news is that he leaves little room for the joy that should have accompanied the music. Instead, the musical interludes appear like oases amid a chilly atmosphere of marital tension and discord.
Perhaps even worse, even though Leonard is played by Cooper himself and Felicia by the great Carey Mulligan (Promising Young Woman), we only sporadically feel like we understand them as either individuals or marital partners.
A big problem is Cooper’s portrayal of Leonard as a nasal-voiced caricature who seems to be consumed by frantic energy. Mulligan’s Felicia is more restrained, but it’s not really clear why the Costa Rican-born thespian decided to spend her life with this flighty musical genius.
As the movie’s first scene points out, Leonard is attracted to men and eager to act on that attraction. Felicia is apparently aware of this and seems OK with it, but you don’t have to be clairvoyant to suspect it eventually will cause tension in the marriage.
Felicia Montealegre and Leonard Bernstein (Carey Mulligan and Bradley Cooper) enjoy one of their first outings. The couple’s early years are depicted in black and white.
Another reason we have trouble understanding the characters is the self-consciously artsy way in which director Cooper and cinematographer Matthew Libbatique tell their story.
The black-and-white photography of the early scenes, the transitions that allow characters to magically walk through a doorway into another location altogether, the heated conversations that are seen from a fixed viewpoint on the other side of the room: All may be impressive in and of themselves, but they cumulatively have a “look at me” quality that detracts attention from the central characters.
Maybe it would have helped us get to know the two if the film had spent less time on their challenging marriage and more on their respective careers. But we see little of Felicia’s acting or of Leonard’s musical collaborations. Even his best-known work, the great Broadway musical West Side Story, gets only a brief mention as an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.
The film eventually does allow Leonard and Felicia and their relationship to come warmly alive, but only after a serious health problem threatens to separate them forever. The change is welcome, but it comes very late in the two-plus-hour running time.
As a conductor, Bernstein said his goal was, in effect, to become the composer so that he and the orchestra could do justice to the artist’s work. As a writer, director and actor, Cooper no doubt wanted to do equal justice to Bernstein and Montealegre, but he was too busy showing off to accomplish the task.
Rating: 2½ stars (out of 5)
Maestro (rated R) opens Nov. 22 in select theaters and Dec. 8 at Columbus’s Drexel Theatre and Gateway Film Center. It will be available through Netflix beginning Dec. 20.
Reel Time With Richard Ades 