As Leonard Bernstein went out to the maestro's podium unrehearsed and came back a world-famous conductor, so I went into Maestro a fan of Leonard Bernstein and came back a fan of Bradley Cooper. He co-wrote the screenplay with John Singer, directed the movie, acted the title role, and conducted a real-live orchestra.
By choosing to start where so many biopics end, when the artist becomes a star, Cooper turns a Hollywood cliché on its head. He's telling us that the artist's stardom is not the story.
The focus instead is established in a prologue, when Bernstein (Cooper convincing as Lenny ca. 1990) tells an interviewer, "I still see her sometimes." She is the actress Felicia Montealegre, his wife, who died of lung cancer in 1978.
When Felicia (played by Carey Mulligan) meets him at a party, he has already composed symphonic works and he's at work on a Broadway musical. She enters her relationship with him open-eyed. She knows that he is promiscuous in loves -- of music, theatre, young men, intoxicants, and cigarettes. She knows, and wants to encourage his artistic growth, as he encourages hers. Can such a marriage work? That's the question behind the rest of the film.
One of Cooper's choices was to film this very public couple's story in black and white until the point in their marriage when color TV became a thing.
A TV interview in the Bernstein home reveals how the marriage is going in 1957: not well. Felicia tells newsman Edward R. Murrow that "it's hard" to raise three children while your husband's in concert halls around the world, on Broadway writing West Side Story, in a TV studio producing an educational series. She says she scarcely has time to be an actress. The subtext is, "It's not working," audible in Carrie Mulligan's tense voice through her forced smile. To a question about conducting v. composing, Lenny says one career is public and "extroverted," while composing opens up a "grand inner life." The subtext is, you're there alone -- no wife, no children. Cooper, as Lenny, makes clear that Lenny hadn't quite realized how torn their relationship and his life are until that very moment. After a pause, he laughs that such a life can make you "schizophrenic."
Another of Cooper's choices was to make Bernstein's own music the soundtrack to his life. Seems obvious, but so effective. Lenny's exuberant, jazzy music from both the ballet Fancy Free and its spinoff musical comedy On the Town is used for a scene of Lenny and Felicia watching a rehearsal that morphs into a fantasy as they join the dancers. Lenny and his longtime lover, splitting up for the sake of appearances, kiss in Central Park for the last time to the accompaniment of "To What You Said," Bernstein's setting of Walt Whitman's poem about the end of a relationship with a "comrade" outside "the customary loves and friendships." In another scene, Felicia cries to see her husband at his best, teaching a chorus of young singers his anthem from Candide, "Make Our Garden Grow." At the gala premier of his Mass, while his music wreaths Kennedy Center with overlapping iterations of his melody for the phrase Laude, laudate -- praising God -- Bernstein grasps hands with his latest boy toy, ignoring Felicia at his other side.
A climactic confrontation takes place in their New York apartment during the Thanksgiving Parade. The family's guests can be heard outside the door, the parade can be heard and seen outside the window, while Felicia and Lenny talk over each other in waves of recrimination. I may be wrong, but I remember that Cooper filmed (and performed) it in a single continuous shot, like a prize fight with several rounds.
Cooper's most daring choice was to take six minutes of the movie to show him as Lenny conducting Mahler's Resurrection symphony in Ely Cathedral, England. No dialogue, no cuts to other locations, only the building ecstasy in Mahler's finale, the intense concentration of the orchestra players, the beatific expressions of the singers, and Lenny's full-body immersion in the music -- leaping, breathing the words, sweating, crying. We cry, too, it's so beautiful. Felicia is there, too, also crying. They embrace: it's an artistic consummation, partly resolving the long line of their story.
There is the sad coda of her cancer. For two of the most moving scenes in the film, Cooper chose to have no dialogue. Lenny, holding Felicia in her sickbed, simply breathes with her. Another scene, Lenny leaves the family in one room, closes the door and grabs a pillow to muffle his own wailing and weeping.
[Read my reflection on the composer whose face, name and music I knew before I was five, and about our phone conversation when I was around 30. See Lentennial: Bernstein at 100 (11/2018) That article includes links to my reviews of Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concerts that featured LB's music. I've also blogged in appreciation of two people in Bernstein's life who appear in the movie at the party where Felicia meets Lenny. They are playwright-lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green, doing "Carried Away," a song they wrote with Lenny for themselves to sing in the musical comedy On the Town. Comden and Green are lovingly remembered in my blogpost Make Someone Happy (11/2006)]
