They say that behind every great man is a great woman. But this has been a year of biopics in which wives have emerged from the great men’s shadows to challenge their menfolk for equal billing. Being yoked to a male “genius” is tough, and the female characters in Oppenheimer, Napoleon, Maestro, Ferrari and Priscilla let them know it. When Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) gets sloppy about hiding his homosexual affairs from his family, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein (Carey Mulligan) lets rip with: “Your truth is a fucking lie. It sucks up all the energy in every room.”
Maestro raises the question of whether the infidelity is a vital part of creativity, or if artistic achievement is just a convenient excuse for selfish behaviour as a wife finds herself increasingly marginalised in her spouse’s life. Felicia was an actor in her own right who put her career on hold to have their children, and, as incarnated by Mulligan, a fascinating study in how she has to do all the heavy emotional lifting if the marriage is to endure. Ironically, following A Star Is Born, this makes the second film in which Cooper, as director, co-writer and star, has allowed himself to be comprehensively upstaged by his leading lady.
