This film’s title suggests that it’s about a man: acclaimed composer/conductor Leonard “Lenny” Bernstein.
But that’s not entirely true. Director Bradley Cooper’s thoughtful, lovingly crafted tone poem actually focuses on the lengthy, loving and tempestuous relationship between Bernstein and actress Felicia Montealegre Cohn.
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| When Felicia (Carey Mulligan) wants Lenny (Bradley Cooper) to slow down and truly pay attention to her, they sit in a field, back to back: a sweet tableau laden with quiet intimacy. |
Cooper and Libatique also worked together on 2018’s A Star Is Born, which earned the latter a well-deserved Academy Award nomination.
As was the case with that earlier film, Cooper again wears three hats: director, co-scripter — with Josh Singer — and star. Thanks to the finely crafted work of prosthetic makeup designer Kazu Hiro, Cooper’s transformation is uncanny: particularly during the onset of Bernstein’s career, in the 1940s.
The performance goes much deeper than mere appearance. Cooper also nails the cadence of Lenny’s stiff, formal manner of speaking — adding emphasis with frequent pauses, as if ensuring his listeners are hanging onto every word — along with the man’s charismatic presence. He wasn’t merely the most interesting person in a given room; he consumed the very atmosphere.
He talks — and smokes — constantly. His running commentary is as relentless as the chained cigarettes.
Lenny also was his own, fiercest taskmaster. We get a sense that he rarely slowed down — perhaps didn’t even know how to do so — because he wanted to maximize the potential of each moment: whether composing, conducting, teaching, partying or indulging in a liberated sexual lifestyle that occasionally threatened his career.
The latter is a running undercurrent in Cooper and Singer’s script, which is drawn heavily from archival video footage, documentaries and interviews — notably those by TV newsman Edward R. Murrow and journalist John Gruen, briefly depicted in this film — and daughter Jamie Bernstein’s 2018 memoir, Famous Father Girl.
Following a brief color prologue that catches an aging Lenny during a solemn, meditative moment, the film stock shifts to monochrome as we bounce back to the World War II era, and the fortuitous event that launched his career. After having spent a few preceding years in Manhattan teaching piano and coaching singers, Lenny was appointed assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic.
His lucky break came on November 14, 1943, when guest conductor Bruno Walter called in sick at the last moment. Lenny made his debut on short notice, without any rehearsal, facing an ambitious program that included works by Richard Strauss, Miklôs Rózsa and Richard Wagner.
Between the live national CBS Radio broadcast and the following day’s celebratory front-page story in The New York Times, Lenny became famous overnight.
Cooper and Singer don’t dwell on the varied career achievements during the rest of this decade, focusing instead on what occurs after Lenny meets Felicia (Carey Mulligan) at a 1946 party given by Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau (from whom she had been taking piano lessons).
It could be argued, just in passing, that this film skips too much; viewers hoping for a straightforward series of highlights from Bernstein’s career are apt to be disappointed. (West Side Story is barely mentioned.) Cooper’s emphasis, as mentioned earlier, is the initially giddy — and ultimately painful — nature of Lenny and Felicia’s relationship: the man, not his myth.
Music fans also are apt to be unhappy with the film’s score. Although pure Bernstein, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, it’s a scattershot mélange of snatches from dozens and dozens of concert, stage and film works: sometimes appropriate to a given scene, sometimes bewildering choices. And always loud ... at times intrusively so.
Lenny and Felicia click instantly, with an effervescent giddiness. Mulligan is radiant, personable and enthusiastic; Felicia easily matches Lenny’s intellectual curiosity, and shares his passion for everything the world might offer.
She also is a calming influence, if only for brief moments; at one point, she impulsively insists that they sit contemplatively in a field, back to back. Lenny is baffled; Cooper is almost comical, depicting the man’s uncertainty over this (to him) bizarre request. And yet this becomes their tableau, to be revisited much later, at a different telling moment.
Despite their shared nature, Lenny and Felicia don’t marry until 1951. Their early years are a blissful blend of work and play; she establishes a busy career with starring roles on stage and in numerous television anthology series — which makes Cooper’s choice of monochrome film stock even more savvy — while Lenny bolsters his fame by scoring the 1953 Broadway musical Wonderful Town and 1954’s On the Waterfront.
Excerpts of the former become an opulent fantasy number, with Lenny suddenly inhabiting one of the starring roles, while Felicia watches from the wings. And we realize, from Mulligan’s mildly wary expression, that Felicia knows she’ll never own more than a superficial portion of her husband. But it’s already too late: She loves him, despite being fully aware of his insatiable appetite for affairs with other women. And men.
He certainly could choose from a wide variety; Lenny and Felicia frequently entertained at home, with lavish parties laden with professional friends and intellectuals of the day, including Adolph Green, Betty Comden, Aaron Copland, Stephen Sondheim, Lillian Hellman, Richard Avedon and many, many others.
Lenny probably shouldn’t have married; his behavior borders on cruelty. And yet he needed to marry Felicia; it becomes obvious that she’s his muse.
“Be discreet,” she implores, more than once: if not to protect his career, then for the sake of their three young children ... advice he repeatedly ignores.
Then, whoosh ... we skip forward to the 1960s and ’70s; Libatique shifts back to color film stock, with a different, period-appropriate aspect ratio. The children — Jamie (Maya Hawke), Alexander (Sam Nivola) and Nina (Alexa Swinton) — are grown, struggling to deal with both their father’s fame and extramarital behavior.
(All three children cooperated fully during the making of this film, and are quite pleased with it.)
Felicia has made peace with the situation; Mulligan’s go-to expression has become a blend of admiration and mild regret. She has a wistful bearing, but Felicia is strong; she now fills her time with social activism, anti-war campaigns and work with Amnesty International.
It’s even harder to nail down time and place during this lengthy second act; specific events — such as Lenny’s charming run as host and conductor of 14 years’ worth of Young People’s Concerts — are a little more than a blur. This act climaxes with an extended slice of Bernstein’s hyperbolic conducting of Mahler’s Second Symphony during a London performance; Cooper throws himself into this moment, as Lenny dynamically cajoles and savors every note with an intensity that feels feral.
And then, soon, we’re back to where we began ... and we now realize why, as in the prologue, Lenny seems only half of who he once was.
Maestro is a dazzling experience: a loving valentine to a talent whose genius and impact probably cannot be depicted in any sort of conventional manner, and whose relationship with Felicia was both crucial and baffling. It’s also impressive filmmaking on Cooper’s part; even so, the haphazard approach to the timeline, and Bernstein’s accomplishments, remains irritating.
Perhaps Cooper should have settled for directing and acting, and let somebody else write the script.
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