Before “Maestro” plunges into the sharp monochrome of its first chapter, Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein relays to a camera crew how he can still feel the presence of his wife within the walls and gardens of their beautiful countryside manor. “I miss her so much,” he says, the passage of time denounced by the sprawling maze of wrinkles that frames his youthful blue eyes.
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It is a poignant opening to Cooper’s attempt at chronicling the life of the multi-hyphenated artist, a man who tried his hand at many creative practices and succeeded in them all. The film comes with an emotional weight to the actor, who has openly and fondly spoken about how getting a baton for Christmas at the ripe age of eight inspired a lifelong love of conducting. Life’s serendipities led Steven Spielberg to Cooper’s door with the original script for “Maestro” in hand, a project the “Jaws” filmmaker first set out to direct but eventually went on to produce.
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With such high personal stakes, it is of little wonder that the actor-turned-filmmaker found himself too cozily nested in the swamp of predictability, opting to tell Bernstein’s story through a classically structured film following the relationship between the musician and actress wife Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). Costa Rican-Chilean Montealegre arrives at the apex of Bernstein’s bachelor lifestyle, first meeting the musician at a lively soirée in his sister’s house and Felicia’s good friend, Shirley (Sarah Silverman). It is easy for Bernstein to become infatuated with the girl, her lively personality heightened by the natural confidence of a performer.
The same stage where they share a tender first kiss acts as a metaphor for the unsteady tides in their marriage. The good periods see Felicia gently waiting by the wings as Leonard commands an orchestra, the sudden end of a composition guiding the man to the loving arms of his watchful wife. The not-so-great periods see the distance between the two marked by a gaping hole where Felicia once stood, the chords of violins echoing through the empty corridors. It is onstage, too, that Felicia reminds herself of the fact she is not just a Bernstein but a Montealegre, motherhood, and marriage never keeping her too far from the craft she loves so dearly.
Much has been said about Cooper donning a sizeable prosthetic nose to embody Bernstein, a decision heavily criticized by the Jewish community in particular, who found the apparatus verges a little too close to mockery (though to be fair, the Bernstein family was consulted, and signed off on the choice). Less has been said, however, of very white, very English Carey Mulligan playing the very Latina Montealegre. In “Maestro,” the Oscar-winning actress displays a twang of an accent and often refers to amusing sayings of her homeland. Such an out-of-touch casting choice covers “Maestro” with a heavy veil of discomfort.
Mulligan has played a Latina character before, Irene, in Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 “Drive.” In the eponymous novel by James Sallis, Irina is a Latina woman in her 20s. She was written as such in the original script but eventually changed to white after Mulligan’s insistence. The sketchy “Drive” debacle pales in comparison to having a white woman play a once-living Latina whose identity was greatly shaped by her cultural and ethnic background.
Not only is the film’s portrayal of Felicia tainted by ethnically inappropriate casting, but her character itself is often reductive—she is but the modern wife of a modern man, coming forth with a loose agreement on fidelity that inched Leonard across the finish line of a lengthy road towards marriage. Tasked with the hard job of condensing Bernstein’s life to a two-hour runtime, Cooper chopped some critical aspects of the composer’s past, but one feels quite vital to the real-life arc of Felicia: the Bernstein’s political life. The actress famously held a party to raise funds to support the families of the “Panther 21,” a group of twenty-one Black Panther Party Members arrested in 1969 with charges of conspiring to kill police and bomb New York sites. She was also the co-founder of the antiwar organization “Another Mother for Piece” and was arrested at an antiwar protest in Washington in 1972.
Cooper believes his portrayal of Felicia to be progressive but is regressive in adding the activist to the beaten trope of “the woman behind the man.” Leonard and Felicia darlingly fall in love in the film’s very charming first half but become enveloped in the bitterness of resentment as the years go by, the unorthodox agreement in which they founded their marriage ripped to shreds during the vigorous years of adulthood and put together again in their wiser twilight years, “Maestro” failing to challenge the conventions of the marriage drama.
Alas, not all is lost, and Cooper’s Netflix affair is at its very best when lingering on questions of creativity fuelled by isolation. Bernstein repeatedly affirms his love of people and the difficulties he faces in depriving himself of others. How can creativity flourish if not allowed moments of introspection? The cruelty of the dilemma ushers the composer in and out of periods of depression, with the film delivering one of the most fitting recent encapsulations of depression when Bernstein melancholically tells his wife, “Summer sang in me a little while. It sings on me no more.”
This understanding of Bernstein’s equal intensity in joy and sorrow crowns Cooper’s performance, the actor disappearing in the physicality of the conductor. If Cate Blanchett communicated Lydia Tár’s entire demeanor through a precisely calculated bending of the fingers, Cooper allows Bernstein to occupy the entirety of his body, possessed by music as if exorcising all the longing and guilt that fuel and threaten his genius. These moments of ecstasy briefly threaten to mask the prosaic nature of “Maestro.” But just briefly. [C]
“Maestro” will have a limited theatrical release on November 22 before hitting Netflix on December 20.
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