Post by Dracula on Dec 19, 2023 12:04:50 GMT -5
Maestro(12/10/2023)
So, on a filmmaking level the film impresses, and yet I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to take away from all this. Going into the movie I knew absolutely nothing about Leonard Bernstein aside from the fact that he did the music from “West Side Story” and that REM thought he would play some sort of role in the end times, so I would be someone who maybe needed a little convincing that this is someone I should care about and I’m not sure the movie ever really made that argument. In fact I wasn’t even aware that he was a gay man before showing up to the movie and was surprised that this would actually be a rather major theme of the movie as it explores whether or not he was simply a gay man in a “lavender marriage” or if he was in fact a bisexual who was legitimately attracted to his wife while also being routinely unfaithful to her and also what she thought of all this. Those are some pretty tricky themes and I’m not sure that Cooper is really the best person to be exploring them. There was controversy before the film came out about his choice to play a Jewish man and employ prosthetic nose makeup to do so. I don’t want to wade into that debate but I will say that the actual film explores these queer themes much more intensely than Bernstein’s Judaism and the fact that Cooper is a (presumably) straight man handicaps the film more than the fact that he’s a gentile. Ultimately it seems to make the whole situation kind of unknowable rather than coming down on an answer; it portrays his infidelity, shows that it occasionally made his wife angry, but the two ultimately never quite reconcile the whole situation. There’s a certain realism to that but I’m not sure what fundamental truth that gets to except that it’s kind of a lousy situation for all involved.
*** out of Five
On the day that The Hangover came out I would not have believed you if you told me that Bradley Cooper was going to be one of the most successful actors-turned-directors of the next decade, and yet things shifted incredibly as he became a much more serious actor working with much more prominent filmmakers. Still I would not have expected him to debut as auspiciously as he did with the film A Star is Born, a movie that maybe got a bit overshadowed in 2019 when it competed with some real heavy hitters, but was certainly made with an extreme amount of skill and suggested that Cooper may well be right up there with Ben Affleck in terms movie stars who seemed talented enough behind the camera to be exciting on that level. Of course Affleck may well be a bit of a cautionary tale as well, as he quickly started to seem a lot less promising not long after his Oscar winning Argo to the point where people barely even remember that he directed Air it was so generic. And there’s a good chance that the sophomore effort was going to be the movie that would decide if Cooper was the real deal or if he just lucked into good material with his debut and for his second effort as a director he’s taken on he rather ambitious project by making Maestro an in depth biopic about the midcentury American composter Leonard Bernstein.
The film briefly begins sometime in the 80s with an aged Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) playing the piano for TV cameras and mentioning how much he misses his wife. The film then flashes back to 1943 and the film transitions to being in the Academy ratio and in black and white and we watch Bernstein in his meteoric rise to fame after being called to fill in for a more experienced conductor who’s fallen ill. Soon after becoming famous he meets an actress named Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) and the two quickly hit it off and marry, but that marriage would be a complicated on in no small part because Bernstein was a closeted bisexual (or possibly just plain gay) and one who is not exactly tied to monogamy, something Montealegre appears to be aware of though not exactly accepting of. From here the movie shifts into color and we continue to watch these two grow older together and we go through several eras of New York high society with the two of them as Bernstein goes through various professional accomplishments.
On a level of pure craft Maestro has a lot going for it. Bradley Cooper already proved himself to be a more than adequate technical filmmaker with A Star is Born and he continues to be here. Matthew Libatique cinematography is once again very strong in all the different filming formats the moving employs and Cooper experiments with some interesting scene transition tricks that keep things engaging early on and there are other flights of fancy here and there which keep the movie from feeling too much like a “stodgy” biopic but also don’t make it feel wildly revisionist for the sake of it either. The film is even more impressive as an acting showcase. The film exists in this Mad Men-core world of the midcentury New York establishment and all the characters talk and act in a way you’d associate with that world in terms of accents and speaking patterns which Cooper is able to recreate effectively and he’s also quite skilled at acting through the rather impressive makeup the film employs in order to age Bernstein up through the decades. And all of this applies to Carey Mulligan as well, who is just as good at bringing Bernstein’s wife to life on screen.
*** out of Five
