A film about a dark visionary who bestrode the 20th century and changed history might be the Oscar favourite, but there’s another biopic to consider, also of a man whose genius made him one of the past century’s greatest figures, one whose creativity and musical gifts brought – and continue to bring – joy to millions. A man who also changed the world, but unequivocally for the better. I’m talking about Leonard Bernstein, of course, and Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, which looks at the great US conductor and composer through the lens of his marriage to Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan).
Maestro is an extraordinary achievement by any standards. Not only is Cooper totally convincing as Bernstein over a four-decade period (much credit here to the extraordinary makeup work of Kazu Hiro, also Oscar-nominated) but he also co-wrote and directed the film. He studied conducting for six years and learned to play the piano; such is his mastery of the maestro that members of today’s London Symphony Orchestra (who recreated the Ely Cathedral scene), who had also played under the real Bernstein in the 1980s, admitted to doing a double take when Cooper-as-Bernstein walked on set.
Cooper has been mocked for his tears in an interview as he speaks of “missing” Bernstein – who died in 1990 when the actor was 15, but he lived with this man, and became him, for several years. “His energy has somehow found its way to me and I really do feel like I know him,” said Cooper. How can he not find it emotional today as he talks about the man he inhabited so completely? The sense of loss he must now feel is palpable.
And yet the film, made with the collaboration and blessing (yes, prosthetic nose included) of the Bernsteins’ three children, is no hagiography. On first viewing, the sheer exuberance of Bernstein’s talent and his wide-eyed delight in his own brilliance might sweep you along, but look closer: laid out here too with sensitivity and subtlety is Bernstein’s struggle to reconcile his inner and outer lives, and his love for men alongside that for his wife and family. There is also the ugliness of antisemitism and homophobia, the tragedy of Felicia’s early death and glimpses of the pain of what some might term her half-life, lived in the shadow of a husband, who, as she puts it: “Sucks up all the energy in every room and gives the rest of us zero opportunity to live or even breathe as our true selves.”
Mulligan and Cooper – both nominated in the best acting categories – excel in showing the intimacy and love of this marriage of minds as well as hearts, and simultaneously its complexities and many strains. The rhythms of their quick-fire conversations are as breathless and dizzying as the camera, which swoops and glides, then slows to delight in details – the morning light flooding in through gaps of a curtained window looking like an expectant stage its curtain about to rise, a paper aeroplane fluttering down the stairwell in a grand Central Park apartment block, a toy Snoopy discarded in a hall prefiguring the surreal absurdity of a giant Snoopy on a Thanksgiving parade float bobbing slowly past the windows as the Bernsteins’ marriage cracks.
And the music. The music. Surely one of the greatest ever scenes of this, of any film ever, is the single six-minute shot of Cooper’s Bernstein conducting Mahler in Ely Cathedral. The last movement of the composer’s second symphony “Resurrection” is allowed to swell and soar, Bernstein’s face glows as he becomes the music and the music becomes him. Threaded throughout the film, his own music is part of the narrative, illuminating some moments, underscoring others and yet the most tender and agonising moment comes with the soundtrack of the Clapping Song.
I had had more than enough of Oppenheimer by the end of those three long hours, and I couldn’t wait to put Barbie back in her box, but I left Maestro wanting to spend more time with this man, hear more of his music and be transported back into his world so painstakingly recreated by Cooper.
