Just last year at Venice, Cate Blanchett was introducing us to the tormented fictional conductor Lydia Tár, who watched old childhood VHS tapes of her mentor, the great conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein talking about the way music triggers in you emotions you didn’t understand and of which you didn’t know you were capable. Now Bradley Cooper, in spectacular hair and makeup, has directed and starred in this heartfelt, garrulous and faintly exhausting film, conceived with sincerity and taste, all about Bernstein and his troubled relationship with his wife, Costa Rican actress and activist Felicia Montealegre Cohn, played with rather brittle English poise and self-deprecating common sense by Carey Mulligan.
Poor Felicia has to come to terms with her megastar husband sucking all the oxygen out of the atmosphere and with the humiliation of his many indiscretions with young men and this is a compulsively fluent film, with Cooper and Mulligan grinning and scatting and chirruping their way through many extended and overlapping dialogue scenes. Cooper has already got into trouble for “Jewface” - though not for “Gayface” - in that he is a non-Jewish man playing a Jewish role with a big prosthetic nose. In fact, in the context of the complete movie, that big nose isn’t a big deal. (It may be karmic-filmic justice for Nicole Kidman’s far more ridiculous fake nose in The Hours, playing one of the great antisemites: Virginia Woolf.)
