movie review: Maestro

This is it: Bradley Cooper's touted bio-pic of Leonard Bernstein has made it to streaming Netflix, and I've seen it. As an old LB fan - I grew up on his Young People's Concerts, learned the standard repertoire from his numerous recordings, and cherish some of his music, especially Candide and Mass - I was primed for this, and it met my expectations.

It was well-made as a film. Some of the segue transitions between scenes were startlingly imaginative, the best I've seen since Lone Star.

I like that it skirted the "tour of famous events" style of most bio-pics, and that it entirely avoided the cringeable technique of having characters identify each other to other people who already know who they are for the sole purpose of catching the audience up. Passing appearances by the likes of Jerome Robbins, Comden and Green, Aaron Copland, and Serge Koussevitsky are sufficiently clear in context for anybody who already knows who they are, and it won't matter if you don't. Some hefty expository lumps are limited to background info and are well-justified, like an actual recording of Edward R. Murrow introducing a tv interview with Lenny and Felicia.

In makeup and prosthetics, Cooper looks enough, sounds enough, and acts enough like the public appearances of Bernstein that, despite some disconcerting moments when he neither looks nor sounds like him, it's believable that this could have been what the private Bernstein was like.

The trailers made some of the scenes with Felicia look pointless, but they work better in context. I didn't always quite get her, though. It's after hearing Mass that she turns on Lenny and tells him his heart is filled with hate, which doesn't sound like him at all. And then after hearing him conduct Mahler's Second, she changes her mind? What? There's an agonizing extended sequence of Felicia dying of cancer, which is evidently there to show that Lenny really does love her. Supposedly she's the central character of this story, but it really doesn't feel that way, even though all that follows her death is a quick overview of his continuing life.

The big Mahler Second scene - in which Cooper actually conducts the way a real conductor would, which impressed me greatly: most actors can't do that, even Dudley Moore, who was a trained musician and ought to have known better - and a scene in which Lenny instructs a young conducting student in handling a fermata in Beethoven's Eighth (and later seduces him) are the only extended scenes of Bernstein the musician, and they're tucked up near the end. I would have liked smaller instances of this scattered about the film than we had.

Oh, there is one scene of him writing a few notes at the piano and then coming out and announcing to the family that he's just finished composing Mass. Actually, it was a much more hair-raising and last-minute process than that.

One particularly interesting scene was when, prompted by Felicia, he lies to their daughter denying the rumors about his sex life. He attributes the rumors to jealousy of his talents. I thought that interesting, since the one time James Levine was forced to address the then-smoldering rumors about his sex life, he also attributed it to jealousy of his talents.

I would only recommend this movie if you're interested in Leonard Bernstein. But if you are, it's not to be missed.