Da Capo

Maestro is not so much a greatest-hits bio as a love story with famous people

Netflix.

[Oscar nominations are out and I’m ahead of schedule with reviews of top contenders like Barbie, Killers of the Flower Moon, The Holdovers, Poor Things, Past Lives, American Fiction, and Oppenheimer. Here’s another — much more to come! ]  

Maestro is so much better than I expected that now I’m actually annoyed by the review headlines that suggested it would not be. Several of these seem to complain that the movie isn’t what so many biopics regrettably are: a cavalcade of ordered lists and grinded axes. The critic Richard Brody, for example, seems from this tweet to think the movie “omits crucial events, context, and characterization.”

Omits crucial events! I’ve been saying for years that the biopic is an inferior art form because “to succeed, it must stay tightly focused on the pains and triumphs of a subject sufficiently famous to command our attention.” I’m sure many of you recognize the syndrome. It’s clearest in the crappy expository dialogue that sputters throughout many such films like an old car engine repeatedly trying to turn over, as in Gandhi — Richard Griffiths haw-hawing, “the other day Winston Churchill called him ‘that half-naked Indian fakir’” and Martin Sheen as a reporter barking into a crank telephone, “Whatever moral ascendance the West held was lost today!”

But even in smoother variants, there is still that tiresome tallying of milestones — that imperative not to “omit crucial events” — that makes most biopics at least slightly risible. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a greatest hits album, except it’s not even the original artist playing them.

Maestro doesn’t much suffer from that, because though the fame won by Leonard Bernstein’s achievements is important to the story, the film doesn’t spend too much time on the details. Oh, at the beginning there’s some obligatory look-there’s-Jerome Robbins, look-there’s-Comden-and-Green, and a big splashy deal is made of Bernstein subbing for Bruno Walter to conduct the Philharmonic one night in 1943 and becoming a star. But there’s far, far less of that after Bernstein meets Felicia Montealegre, the woman who’ll become his wife and his counterbalance — at least after their expository meet-cute (“Your father, a self-made businessman steeped in Talmud. Harvard, then Curtis School for Music…”).  It’s assumed that we either already know enough of the career highlights, or will pick enough of them up along the way, to suffice.

Anyway those highlights are not what the story is about. I mean, West Side Story is reduced to a (very clever) music cue, while a long passage is devoted to the Laude from Bernstein’s Mass, which I think no one loves but me.

So what then is Maestro about besides “and then I wrote”?  Leonard and Felicia. Also a little about art and what love has to do with that. But mainly them.

Young Leonard takes to stardom, particularly the highbrow sort he gets, like a swan to a lake; he radiates intellectual and artistic energy but also the sexual variety, and he likes men. But he falls for Felicia. She’s a working actress, both accomplished and highborn enough to meet the ascendant Leonard at his level, and from the start she’s clearly smitten. When she plays a scene with him in an abandoned theater — Lenny, self-consciously a non-actor, fumbling, while her desire projects to the back row — she doesn’t so much seduce him as let her love show so he knows what she has to offer.

Lenny loves her back. We see them on a lawn at Tanglewood, resting back to back and playing a think-of-a-number game. “I’ve never seen you sit still for so long,” says Felicia. “Are you itching to move?” “No, I’m not... actually, at all,” says Lenny, as if this has never happened to him before.

They’re a great power couple, extremely intelligent and verbal and glamorous and reveling in all their gifts. As Lenny’s star takes off, problems emerge. When they met, Felicia told him, with regards to luck’s role in the advancement of talent, “don’t forget you are a man,” and Lenny replied, “I never do.” Now when they go on the Ed Murrow show the chat is all about him and his career.

And of course he has affairs. At the beginning Felicia tells him, “I know exactly who you are,” and they seem to have an arrangement. “I love too much,” Lenny says, helplessly. It’s not all roses for him, a Jew and gay. A late scene in which he has to assure his daughter that those rumors she’s heard about him aren’t true is painful not just because of its necessity (Felicia insists; their arrangement doesn’t restrain only her), but also because we see he realizes that as hard as the truth would have been on their relationship, this is much worse.

You may suspect from this that Maestro is about feminist/gay liberation issues such as the unfortunate effects of social pressures and prejudice, and that’s certainly in there. But these are privileged people who could have made other accommodations or simply called the whole thing off. Instead they decide to deal with these pressures —and career, family, friendship, etc. — in just such a way in order to preserve the relationship they both want, and it eats them up.

Felicia seems to get the rougher ride. She has been clear-eyed, so far as it goes: She says this is the deal she made and that she accepts what comes with it. That is, until she can’t: “It’s so fucking draining to love and accept someone who doesn’t love and accept themselves,” she tells him, calling not just his hand but his whole deck.

And we see that Lenny, for all the music that comes out of him, knows not only far less than Felicia does about their relationship, but also far less about himself. His gifts and their attendant honors have helped him avoid it, and so he has never fully engaged and reciprocated its blessings. (Nearly every supernumerary in the film looks at him with awe at all times.)

Lenny does have it in him — as we are led to believe by passages of his composition and conducting (unlabeled, unannounced) that show not only great skill and accomplishment but also great depths of feeling. (Music is maybe what he thinks he means when he talks about love.) We are even led to believe that Lenny advances as an artist and as a human being, especially in the final crisis of his and Felicia’s relationship.

But I was left with the sense — and this might just be me — that Lenny never got all of it, and may never have known that he didn’t. Or maybe he did know. But which is worse? So in the end Maestro may have the elements of a biopic, but it’s really a love story between famous people.

As you may imagine, nearly everything rests on the two leads. Bradley Cooper has mastered Bernstein’s affect, particularly his denasalized, burbling voice, and shows us his insatiability and his childish reaction whenever he’s thwarted. Carey Mulligan comes in with great force and patrician confidence and we can see her determination to not to let heartbreak make a fool of her, and what that makes of her instead. Together Cooper and Mulligan make this relationship absolutely believable and worth your time whether you knew who these people were or not.