{"id":10191,"date":"2024-02-29T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-02-29T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10191"},"modified":"2024-02-28T17:07:07","modified_gmt":"2024-02-28T22:07:07","slug":"maestro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2024\/02\/29\/maestro\/","title":{"rendered":"Maestro."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Leonard Bernstein lived a long and interesting life, earning his place in the pantheon of American music. It\u2019s hard to believe Maestro <\/em>couldmake him and his life so utterly boring. (It\u2019s streaming exclusively on Netflix.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Directed and co-written by Bradley Cooper, Maestro <\/em>is a formulaic biopic that often seems afraid to truly engage with its subject (played by Cooper) or his wife, Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). The film begins with Bernstein at age 25, thrust into the lead conductor role one night at the New York Philharmonic when the guest conductor is unable to go on, a jumbled mess of a scene that foreshadows the movie\u2019s chronic problems with pacing and tempo. Bernstein is in a relationship with the clarinet player David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer), but soon afterwards meets Felicia at a cocktail party, pursuing and marrying her, although he was gay and had a series of affairs with men throughout their marriage. His career progresses in the background, with nods here and there to his series of successful endeavors (and no mention of his big flop, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue<\/em>, which became his last Broadway musical), while his marriage teeters and he and Felicia separate, briefly, before reuniting because he conducted a great performance in 1973. And then she gets cancer and dies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maestro<\/em> isn\u2019t even bad, or so-bad-it\u2019s-good, but dull. Bernstein was fascinating as a person and a composer, yet the film does neither side of him justice. He wrote the music and score for West Side Story<\/em>, scored On the Waterfront<\/em>, and wrote three symphonies and numerous other orchestral and chamber pieces, which you\u2019d barely glean from this film. There\u2019s relatively little of his music, certainly not his most famous pieces, in the movie, yet the script focuses for an eternity on that one 1973 performance, where he conducted the London Symphony Orchestra at Ely Cathedral \u2013 a show that, in the film, led Felicia to forgive his infidelities, which seems to be a bit of Hollywood nonsense. If you knew nothing of Bernstein before watching Maestro<\/em>, you would likely leave the film believing he was a conductor and not a composer, or at best a minor composer of lesser-known works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His relationship with Felicia is supposed to be the heart of the film, but it\u2019s in cardiac arrest; it\u2019s a series of interactions, but few if any are illuminating, and there is zero chemistry of any sort between the two of them, which matters given how much the film wants us to believe that, despite his homosexuality, he both cared for and needed Felicia. It\u2019s as if the two characters barely inhabit the same universe, exacerbated by both actors\u2019 attempts to mimic the accents and intonations of the people they\u2019re portraying, which makes Mulligan sound like she\u2019s in a Julian Fellowes period piece. The drive for verisimilitude in biopics has some clear drawbacks, from the distractions of Cooper\u2019s makeup and voice mimicry to the sense that these two characters aren\u2019t even from the same era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nothing sinks Maestro <\/em>as much as how boring the story is, though. There are certainly several ways to treat a protagonist who\u2019s a philanderer, and struggling with his sexual identity in a time of entrenched discrimination and bigotry, yet is also an icon in his field and was recognized as a genius in his own time. Maestro <\/em>seems unwilling to engage with the darker side of Bernstein\u2019s character \u2013 that, even if Felicia accepted him as who he was and what he was doing, he seemed to be using her as cover and as an emotional support. There\u2019s a bigger question of whether a relationship like this can even work, or be equitable, but the script never comes close to exploring it. I\u2019m mystified by the wide acclaim for the film, but there\u2019s always one major Oscar-nominated film that I just don\u2019t get.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speaking of which, Maestro <\/em>was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Original Screenplay; needless to say, I don\u2019t think it should win any of them, with multiple better choices in each category. Greta Lee (Past Lives<\/em>) should have had Mulligan\u2019s nod, and Leonardo DiCaprio (Killers of the Flower Moon<\/em>) or Andrew Scott (All of Us Strangers<\/em>) would have been a better choice than Cooper. The one race to watch here would be Best Makeup and Hairstyling, given the controversy over Cooper\u2019s use of a prosthetic nose to better resemble Bernstein, a choice that the composer\u2019s children have publicly supported. I don\u2019t believe there\u2019s a clear favorite in that category, since Barbie<\/em> was snubbed, while Variety <\/em>and Indiewire have both tabbed Maestro<\/em> as the likely winner. I haven\u2019t seen three of the five nominees yet, so I\u2019ll defer any opinion on this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leonard Bernstein lived a long and interesting life, earning his place in the pantheon of American music. It\u2019s hard to believe Maestro couldmake him and his life so utterly boring. (It\u2019s streaming exclusively on Netflix.) Directed and co-written by Bradley Cooper, Maestro is a formulaic biopic that often seems afraid to truly engage with its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1357,1383,1377,1382,1376,102,215],"class_list":["post-10191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2023-movies","tag-2024-best-actor-nominees","tag-2024-best-actress-nominees","tag-2024-best-original-screenplay-nominees","tag-2024-best-picture-nominees","tag-disappointments","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10191"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10192,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10191\/revisions\/10192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}