Leonard Bernstein was one of the most influential figures in 20th century American music. As composer of the score for West Side Story and many other Broadway hits, conductor of the New York Philharmonic, and beloved ambassador for classical music through his TV appearances, Bernstein made an indelible mark during his dynamic career.
So when actor-director Bradley Cooper took on the challenge of bringing Bernstein’s story to the big screen after his smash success with A Star Is Born, expectations were sky high. Cooper aimed to capture Bernstein’s outsized talent and personality, going to great method acting lengths by learning to conduct, play piano convincingly, and even donning a prosthetic nose to resemble Bernstein’s distinctive profile.
This transformation sparked some controversy as Cooper is not Jewish himself. But reviews out of early festival screenings have been glowing, with particular praise for Cooper’s direction, Carey Mulligan’s central performance as Bernstein’s wife Felicia Montealegre, and the film’s impressionistic, non-traditional take on the musical icon’s life.
While Maestro may take some artistic license with biographical details, critics concur that Cooper and company have crafted an loving tribute to Bernstein’s legacy. With awards season buzz already swirling after its warm festival reception, Maestro seems poised to strike a major chord with audiences when it lands in theaters in November.
The Beats of Bernstein’s Life
Maestro opens with an elderly Leonard Bernstein reminiscing while seated at a piano, before flashing back to retrace the iconic conductor’s meteoric rise to fame. We first meet Bernstein as a 25-year-old, bounding out of bed with a male lover and rushing to make a last-minute conducting debut at Carnegie Hall, cementing his reputation overnight.
Soon after, Lenny meets the quick-witted Felicia Montealegre at a cocktail party, beginning a lively courtship. Despite Lenny’s homosexuality, they wed, united by mutual affection and artistic passions. But Felicia gradually discovers the extent of her husband’s affairs with younger male protégés, whose company and admiration Lenny finds impossible to resist even as it strains their marriage.
Through the years, tensions heighten over unspoken whispers regarding Bernstein’s sexuality. Felicia protects her husband despite feeling increasingly hurt and betrayed, while their daughter Jamie grows resentful over her parents’ lifelong secrecy and hearsay throughout Bernstein’s sphere of celebrity artist friends.
In between, we get glimpses of Lenny’s renowned creative genius, with Cooper recreating iconic moments like his Young People’s Concerts educating students, lively jam sessions around the family piano, and of course footage of the Maestro himself conducting orchestras to triumphant musical climaxes.
Yet even when the melodies soar, Felicia struggles to cope with private turmoil until finally reaching an emotional epiphany. She realizes that for all the heartache, her decades with this brilliant, contradictory, larger-than-life man have comprised the great adventure of her own life as well. Felicia ultimately embraces a hard-won outlook of acceptance, even forgiveness, toward Lenny and the rich artistic legacy they built.
Visionary Images and Stylized Storytelling
In directing Maestro, Bradley Cooper demonstrates a bold confidence behind the camera, full of energetic flourishes yet reverent toward his real-life subject. He is aided by inventive cinematography from his A Star Is Born collaborator Matty Libatique, making striking use of black-and-white amidst vivid color. The optical contrasts visually delineate eras in one sense, but more meaningfully differentiate between reality and memory, between external events and internal emotional truths.
The monochromatic footage calls to mind Hollywood’s golden age, making room for Cooper to employ impressionistic narrative techniques rather than standard biopic convention. Fantasy dance numbers bleed into period cocktail parties, while a heartfelt public exchange between Felicia and Lenny regarding his affairs unfolds silently in the foreground as a surreal Thanksgiving Day Parade marches blithely by the windows behind them.
It’s this type of stylized and lyrical storytelling through images that allows the viewer to feel the rhythms of passion, betrayal, reconciliation and everything in between within the Bernsteins’ marriage. We are not merely told about the key inflection points, but invited to inhabit them.
From playful symmetrical shots of Felicia and Lenny’s dancing silhouettes to quiet interludes peering at Carey Mulligan’s face as she disguises inner turmoil amidst the chatter of guests, Cooper crafts indelible filmic moments throughout. Arresting visuals replace exposition at every turn, culminating in what one early rave review singled out as “a shot-for-shot recreation of Bernstein conducting Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony that matches the original performance’s charisma, vigor and visible joy.”
In this and every sequence, Cooper’s camera becomes something like Bernstein’s baton itself, commanding our gazes through virtuosic style in service of an emotional symphony. Maestro represents a quantum leap in directorial artistry from the already assured hand behind A Star Is Born.
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Magnets and Magnets Alike: Electric Lead Turns
In the title role, Bradley Cooper once again proves himself a master chameleon. He disappears beneath hair, makeup and a prosthetic nose to fully inhabit Leonard Bernstein’s signature look. Beyond the physical transformation, Cooper captures both the world-enveloping magnetism and internal contradictions of this restless figure, equally voracious for music, fame, teaching, men and family all at once.
We watch Bernstein toggle from gregarious to cruel, playful to petty. Yet even as the mercurial maestro betrays those closest to him over and over, Cooper’s charisma makes his high-energy passion for living irresistible. Critics rave over both his dramatic emotional honesty and show-stopping set pieces like learning to play the piano and conducting an orchestra before our eyes just as Bernstein himself did in countless archival clips.
But as in A Star Is Born, Bradley Cooper demonstrates his directorial generosity by ensuring the film’s true gravitational center belongs to his leading lady. As Felicia Montealegre, Carey Mulligan is simply stunning.
Her performance requires no showy mimicry because it rings with such resounding emotional truth. With utmost subtlety, her facial expressions and carefully modulated reactions wordlessly convey the toll of public perfection hiding private pain over decades. We watch Felicia building an acting career, raising a family, enduring infidelities and holding fast to independence, all the while understanding her celebrated husband in ways others cannot.
When major arguments and confrontations do arise, Mulligan makes quiet devastation into high drama through sheer understatement. Surrounding her with ace supporting turns from Maya Hawke as the couple’s judgmental daughter and Sarah Silverman as Lenny’s wry sister, Cooper generously gives his co-stars room to breathe.
But make no mistake: Maestro starts and ends with two towering, Oscar-caliber lead performances. Both Cooper and Mulligan seize attention like the quick flick of a conductor’s baton at every moment they’re on screen.
Universal Chords: Timeless Takes on Life and Art
While recounting the particulars of Bernstein’s story, Maestro also resonates with a number of profound themes that give the film universal appeal. For one, Lenny’s single-minded pursuit of his musical passion creates as much collateral damage in his personal relationships as career success. Through him we are reminded of the oft-unavoidable reality that genius emerges from inner compulsion, driving creation whatever the interpersonal cost.
Similarly, the film gives poignant insight into the cultural constraints surrounding sexuality and identity in Bernstein’s era that ripple painfully through family generations. We witness the pressures to present a heteronormative facade despite one’s truth, and the bitterness that deception leaves behind.
Beyond such resonant sociocultural commentary, Maestro also offers wisdom about the nature of fame, here shown as alluring yet hollow when built on the shifting sands of public appetite rather than personal fulfillment. We see that fleeting celebrity cannot compete with the hard-won history of love shared between two people, however imperfect.
For at its core, this is a story about the mysteries of what binds us to one another despite divergent needs and frequent misunderstandings. Felicia and Leonard created an enduring union through musical collaboration and compromise more than either fidelity or traditional marital contentment. Across four decades marked by career highs, infidelity and long silences, their attachment retains a singular power to satisfy spiritual yearnings that worldly success and culturally prescribed roles could not.
Just as Bernstein created timeless concertos by channeling his era’s uncertainty into song, Maestro finds hope within grief through the transcendent force of music itself. As Felicia ultimately concludes, Lenny “needs the music to sing in him” because creativity emerges from life’s full symphony of joy and pain. Through conduction he could orchestrate harmony from dissonance, and when the melodies soar, the viewer soars as well.
Painterly Palettes: Frames as Fine Art
Beyond actor portrayals, the most striking element viewers will take away from Maestro is the arresting imagery throughout. Cinematographer Matty Libatique makes virtuosic use of both color and its absence to tell Bernstein’s story through painterly palettes rather than typical biopic visuals.
Stark yet sensuous black-and-white footage calls to mind classic Hollywood cinema, lending Cooper freedom for more lyrical flights of fancy around real events. But selective moments rendered in living color act like complete tonal shifts rather than just denoting timeline progressions from past to present.
For example, a confrontation between Felicia and Lenny at their lush Connecticut estate is bathed in the greens of both her withering jealousy and the literal flora surrounding them. The verdant hues externalize buried emotions now forced to the surface after years of denial.
Long tracking shots like young Bernstein bounding jubilantly through Carnegie Hall’s backstage corridors visualize the rushing momentum of impending fame, just as dance numbers organically interwoven with period cocktail parties express romance kindling through unspoken attraction and creative kinship.
Cooper also employs silhouettes and tableaus to poetic effect, whether in the symmetrical choreography of Felicia and Lenny’s smoky duplicating shapes or overwhelming isolation conveyed by her small shadow enveloped within his AFTER infidelity’s reckoning.
From beginning to end, Maestro utilizes painterly palettes and arresting imagery rather than pedestrian visual vocabulary. The camerawork proves as rhythmically dynamic as the legendary conductor’s own compositions and conducted performances so iconically committed to film.
The Envelope Please: Maestro as Major Contender
With rapturous early reception marking Maestro as an artistic triumph, expectations are similarly sky-high when it comes to awards season prospects. The film seems destined to echo the tremendous impact of Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut A Star Is Born, which garnered eight Oscar nominations including Best Actor and Best Actress.
Once again Cooper has drawn what critics call an “Oscar-caliber” turn from his leading lady. As Felicia Montealegre, Carey Mulligan is already considered a frontrunner for Best Actress nods thanks to her nuanced navigation of thorny emotions. She stands out even amidst a gloriously decorated cast, telegraphing intelligence and decades of cultivated poise even when grappling with profound private pain.
Meanwhile, Cooper’s metamorphosis into the dynamic Leonard Bernstein represents another in a string of transformative turns that should catch the attention of the Academy’s acting branch. His previous nominations came for more understated work; here he gets to showcase a bigger, brasher character fully coming into his own as a director.
On the creative side, Maestro seems destined for below-the-line attention as well. The cinematography by Matty Libatique (himself an Oscar nominee for A Star Is Born) makes light and shadow into an artistic lexicon for articulating the story’s interior landscape. And the production design team face the challenge of recreating influential cultural touchstones like Bernstein’s midcentury Manhattan apartment along with the richly appointed interiors of venues from Carnegie Hall to the Vatican.
Finally, the integration of Leonard Bernstein’s own acclaimed compositions into a story about his life offers a unique opportunity for the film’s score to be recognized. Throughout, Cooper allows both quiet and climactic moments to be carried entirely by the conductor’s catalog from West Side Story to Mass, showcasing the timeless brilliance of his canonical work.
With such an auspicious start coming out of festivals, Maestro hits theaters well-positioned to fare very well across a broad slate of Oscar categories. If voters take to the film’s artful approach, it could write a Hollywood ending for Bradley Cooper’s career-long quest to bring this 20th century genius to the big screen.
Curtain Call: An Imperfect Ovation, but Rapturous All the Same
Maestro does not claim to offer a comprehensive cradle-to-grave portrait of an undeniably towering cultural figure in Leonard Bernstein. Nor does it rival the polished perfection of Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut. Yet in choosing a more impressionistic approach focused tightly on one relationship’s emotional journey over a traditional biopic’s wide lens, Cooper crafts an loving tribute fueled by insight and artistry.
The film falters briefly when ceding to too-literal reenactments of widely available historical footage. But its flair for stylization and reliance on Carey Mulligan’s Felicia to ground the narrative both save Maestro from succumbing to episodic tedium. What we get instead are glimpses into the mystery of marriage, the mercurial nature of genius, and the transcendent powers of music to channel both agony and ecstasy.
That the melodies themselves soar even when the storytelling occasionally stalls is a testament to Cooper’s reverence for Bernstein as well as his faith in actors. For Mulligan particularly, her scenes of underplayed devastation amassed across years of quiet compromise make Felicia the standout role over her showier real-life husband. Meanwhile Leonard lives on through his work, with Cooper allowing orchestral interludes to communicate wordlessly everything from falling in love to the anguish of betrayal.
Do such sequences veer toward emotional shorthand when the script itself gives supporting characters like the couple’s daughter short shrift? Perhaps. But Cooper commits to his closeup-focused approach with such cocksure conviction that one overlooks the occasional heavy-handed moment.
In the end, Maestro represents both a worthy use of Bradley Cooper’s accrued industry goodwill to honor a titan of 20th century music, as well as a suggestive glimpse at the next phase of his promising directing career. Both fans of classical composition and actor showcases will find themselves rapt during this impressionistic ode to fame, family, and the many movements contained within a singular life.
The Review
Maestro
Maestro hits a few flat notes in its loose approach to linear storytelling and thin development of secondary characters. But Bradley Cooper once again proves himself a muscular directing talent, while Carey Mulligan provides a soulful anchor that grounds the film's soaring emotions. The musical sequences dazzle even when the drama lags elsewhere. What we're left with is an imperfect but nonetheless valuable glimpse at a towering cultural figure, filtered through one marriage’s intoxicating highs and agonizing lows.
PROS
- Bradley Cooper gives a magnetic, charismatic performance as Leonard Bernstein
- Carey Mulligan is excellent as Felicia Montealegre, providing an emotional core
- Impressionistic visual style with arresting black-and-white cinematography
- Fantastic musical sequences with Bernstein's scores woven throughout
- Cooper shows off terrific directing skills and vision
- Lovingly crafted period details and production design
CONS
- Narrative and pacing issues in the script
- Supporting characters like the daughter feel underdeveloped
- Some scenes too heavily replicate real-life historical footage
- Prosthetic nose on Cooper may be seen by some as problematic
