Julia Hamilton loves Bradley Cooper’s take on Leonard Bernstein.
This is not just any old biopic. This is Bradley Cooper’s stunning take on the towering cultural figure of Leonard Bernstein – co-written and directed by Cooper, to boot.
Maestro covers miles of chronological ground, beginning with an aged, white-haired Lenny armed with two indispensable items, a piano and a cigarette, being filmed in his apartment while he plays and talks to camera. I don’t think there’s a single scene in the entire movie in which Bernstein is not smoking and Felicia Montealegre Cohn (Carey Mulligan) is almost as bad. When she is diagnosed with breast cancer that has spread from her lung, the shock is not the diagnosis but the fact that she’s got away with it for so long.
From this opening scene of the distinguished maestro, the viewer is whisked back to the bedroom of a 25-year-old unknown conductor who is woken from his slumbers by a phone call on November 14, 1943 telling him that Bruno Walter is unwell and that Bernstein, with barely any warning and no rehearsal, must conduct the New York Philharmonic.
He erupts out of his bedroom and, with the aid of some clever camerawork, straight onto the balcony at Carnegie Hall. Here we have the story of his life: bed to auditorium in one fell swoop, the twin arenas of Bernstein’s existence.
A further wave of the magic wand (the film is still, rather wonderfully, in period black and white at this point) and we are at an outdoor lunch at the house of Claudio Arrau, with Bernstein seated next to an actress, Felicia Montealegre Cohn, whom he instantly adores and will later marry. Serge Koussevitzky (Yasen Peyankov) announces to the table that Lenny had better change his name to the more integrated-sounding Burns, so that this son of Russian immigrants can become the first great “American” conductor. Lenny and Felicia express their disdain for such an idea by abandoning the party.
For better or worse, the narrative swerves Bernstein’s childhood and adolescence, and his politics. That famous “radical chic” cocktail party in their Park Avenue apartment to raise funds for the defence of imprisoned Black Panther members is left out, as is Bernstein’s take on his Judaism. This is a film centred on his relationship with Felicia, and Mulligan’s performance as steel magnolia crossed with Mary Poppins is pitch-perfect.
Following in Bernstein’s slipstream proves no easy act and the early propulsion underpinning their relationship soon begins to ebb away, partly because of babies and the never-ending labour of love that bringing up children entails, but also because of Bernstein’s fondness for beautiful boys. Felicia knows he’s attracted to men when she marries him, but what she doesn’t realise is how much of his energy and attention these affairs will take up. The film might equally well have been entitled Burnout – anyone too near Bernstein is liable to fry in the irradiated fallout from his enormous life; not that he cares.
When his elder daughter Jamie (Maya Hawke) asks him if the rumours she has heard at Tanglewood about his sexuality are true, he acts as instructed by Felicia – “Don’t you dare tell her the truth” – but it’s hard to escape the feeling that he’d have liked to. She’s now old enough to hold up the mirror at an interesting angle for her father. In this movie, it’s all about him, always. Casualties, his wife’s feelings, her work, the sanctity of the father/child relationship: everything is expendable in pursuit of the cause of Lenny’s genius.
And yet, Felicia stays. She is cool, she is centred. She gets angry with her husband but it doesn’t consume her: she is the still small voice of calm.
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