Young Lenny Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) at his Carnegie Hall debut, in ‘Maestro’ (2023)
Conducting One’s Life in Public
What is this we’re watching? Lenny snorting cocaine? Lenny having affairs with young men? Lenny getting married, Lenny having children? The gala premieres, the boisterous nightlife, the concerts, the debuts, the banter, the repartee? Where’s the “radical chic”?
In the new film Maestro (2023), Bradley Cooper stars as the dearly beloved American-born conductor, composer, and lively raconteur Leonard Bernstein, first as a young prodigy (in appearance, not so much), then in middle age (better), and finally at age 70 (best!). The gray hairs and wrinkles complement the overall picture.
At the start, Bernstein gets a 9:00 a.m. wakeup call to take over the Boston Symphony later that day from an indisposed Bruno Walter at Carnegie Hall. He’s lying in bed with another man, so audiences are clued in right off the bat as to where this biopic is going: to Lenny’s intimate, indiscreet side.
Not to mistake Lenny for Lenny Bruce, the foul-mouthed standup comic interpreted by Dustin Hoffman in Bob Fosse’s 1974 film, the title of which has already been used. But “Lenny” as in Leonard (born Louis) Bernstein, our titular maestro. This Lenny made classical music history in Carnegie Hall, leading the orchestra in Robert Schumann’s “Manfred” Overture.
In the next section he’s with choreographer Jerome (“Jerry”) Robbins working on their ballet Fancy Free, about three sailors on shore leave in New York City. The two of them are laboring over the score, spouting rapid-fire dialogue analogous to the work’s free-flowing dance movements. So far, so good.
Bradley Cooper, who also directed, cowrote and coproduced the film, gets the manic nature of the man down pat, that visceral, ever-vacillating disposition, and his high voltage personality; a veritable ball of fire, restless, urbane, full of pent-up energy and vigor. Lenny, his dynamic as well as his bombastic sides – all present and accounted for in his best scores.
As Cooper envisions, Bernstein is a man possessed, one who pours every ounce of resources into his music and into his conducting duties, which blossomed after his history-making debut. Early on, lyricists Betty Comden (Mallory Portnoy) and Adolph Green (Nick Blaemire) are pictured entertaining the gang at a dinner party for theater folk.
Into this urban setting comes the lovely Felicia Montealegre (vulnerable Carrie Mulligan, well cast and richly deserving of an Oscar) of Chilean-Costa Rican-Jewish descent. Bernstein’s talkative sister Shirley (a marvelously loquacious Sarah Silverman) is there, too. She introduces Felicia to big brother Lenny. An equally incessant and lively chatterer, Lenny and Felicia are shown chain-smoking and making small talk. They’re the life of any party.
Felicia Montealegre (Carrie Mulligan) with Lenny (Bradley Cooper) in the park
Scenes depicting Lenny and Felicia’s lives whizz by in haphazard fashion, the early portions of which are captured in high-contrast black and white, while subsequent episodes are imbued with a richer color palette. We witness the couple’s first kiss and their manic reactions to one another. But already we feel the manifest tension present, the clash of iron wills: Bernstein trying to analyze Felicia and getting the basis for her lack of theatrical success all wrong. It’s not “fear of success,” as Lenny hints to her, but an unfortunate lack of luck.
Well, no, it’s not that either. Lenny compares his situation to that of fellow conductor Artur Rodziński moving in and Bruno Walter falling out of favor. Surely fate, one gathers, must have had a hand in Bernstein’s success. But it hadn’t rubbed off on Felicia. Still, both he and Felicia fall deeply in love and get deserved ovations for their respective performances. Inevitably, Lenny misses his wife’s last minute Broadway stage appearance which leads to increased friction between them.
In Cooper’s vision, Bernstein is comparable to an electric light bulb gone wrong: You can’t turn him off, since he’s always turned on. He needs to be at the center of everyone’s attention. For instance, we see Lenny together with composer Aaron Copland (Brian Klugman), a fellow closeted gay man, who develop a lifelong friendship. But where are Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti? Oh, look, there’s Serge Koussevitsky (Yasen Peyankov) giving some advice. One situation leads to another, when suddenly we’re whisked off to where Fancy Free is being rehearsed. “Not serious music,” is someone’s critical assessment.
Next, we see “Three Dance Variations” performed in a dream sequence that, if Cooper had viewed the Coen Brothers’ farcical Hail, Caesar! (2016), would ring a bell with anyone over its “gay” thematic. Did this sequence actually occur? Not likely. But even if it did, what does it have to say about Leonard Bernstein the maestro, the first great American conductor of a major American orchestra; the never-at-a-loss for words, vivacious and ubiquitous homegrown talent, the concert and television personality?
Dance sequence from ‘Fancy Free’ in Bradley Cooper’s ‘Maestro’ (2023)
We hear the song “New York, New York,” and indeed it is a wonderful town. Yes, we get it. Life and art will mesh, no doubt about it. They complement each other and ultimately blend together (as songwriter Cole Porter’s song “Friendship” once informed us) until one becomes inseparable from the other.
This leads viewers back to our couple, who decides to give marriage a whirl, even if Felicia confesses to Lenny that “she knows exactly who he is.” Meaning: She’s on to his closeted lifestyle. Later, Lenny and Felicia, along with Jamie and Alexander Bernstein, their children, are interviewed by Edward R. Murrow at their apartment in Manhattan. There’s talk of his turning Romeo and Juliet into a musical (the inevitable West Side Story), a film score for On the Waterfront, and the early TV program Omnibus, but also precious little context or insight into any of these productions. Where are the televised Young People’s Concerts? Where is Bernstein’s rabbinical obsession with having to explain everything to everyone? You’ll have to look elsewhere for them.
The film’s formula is this: Bernstein as composer/creator versus Bernstein the performing artist. As a conductor = the public life; as a creative force = sitting alone in one’s room. Viewers are treated to Lenny’s intimate inner life instead of his much grander outer one. With his ever-present lighted cigarette in hand, puffing away at every opportunity, Lenny’s life it seems goes up in smoke.
Now, about that “prosthetic nose” controversy: It’s not as large or prominent an issue as the press has made it out to be. In fact, Bernstein’s most evident physical characteristics, in this author’s view, were his unusually large earlobes. As far as Bradley Cooper’s interpretation is concerned, it both “is” and “isn’t” Lenny. He does a better job of conveying the crustiness of the conductor’s 70-year-old persona than he does with the younger, flashier dynamo.
As for Felicia, Ms. Mulligan depicts her as sacrificing her professional life for a dual role as dutiful wife and mother to the maestro and their children. There’s lots of talk between them, some of it involving namedropping, most of it nonstop, fast-paced, rapid-fire staccato, furiously delivered – verbal hemorrhaging as my friend Gerald Thomas once put it. In fact, the best scene in the picture concerns the couple’s Thanksgiving Day quarrel, hurled at top speed in a stream of consciousness give-and-take of allegations, charges and countercharges, all at a literate level far above your standard husband-and-wife banter. The intellectual heft is breathtaking, to say the least.
We’re also privy to bits and pieces of music associated with the maestro, i.e., the Adagietto from Mahler’s 5th Symphony; there’s Bernstein’s friendship with his mentors Copland and Koussevitsky; and Lenny’s gushing pride in his wife and young son.
Carrie Mulligan as Felicia Montealegre in ‘Maestro’ (2023)
In the Mahler piece, we see Felicia’s superimposed image, tiny in comparison and overshadowed (as it were) by Lenny’s larger form. The thought is that she is losing her husband to his profession. That her own career was dwarfed by his more towering one. About a third of the way in, we’re treated to glorious color, the light and dark giving way to and replaced by luscious greens, yellows, blues, gold, aqua, and okra.
Cookie Cutter Boys
Bernstein struggles with concert appearances, and doing recordings when he should be composing. Whoops, there goes the sex life again! At this stage, Bernstein’s dalliances with handsome young males get to be a bit much, even for Felicia’s endless patience. Interviews, discussions about his lack of creativity, one-on-ones with an author wanting to write a book about him or getting Lenny to write one – it’s a losing battle.
Yet, where is the genius behind all this activity? It’s all on the surface, the substance of which gets buried in an avalanche of words, words, and more words that struggle to connect with viewers yet do little to help illustrate the conducting and compositional bent of the genius that was Leonard Bernstein.
Lenny’s compulsive work ethic is there, in spurts and in separate or related scenes, jumbled together and in between his encounters with interviewers and such – sort of a “file association” technique which must have been how the real-life Bernstein operated, in competition with the movie version.
Part of his struggle to be a composer of merit was his overwhelming love for individuals, for being around and with them; his loathing of being left alone, forgotten and tossed to the side. But where was Bernstein’s connection to Judaism and his Jewish heritage, his passion for Israel, his work with the New York Philharmonic, and his support of liberal causes, among them his controversial association with the Black Panther movement? Besides the above activities, what we are missing in Maestro is the context.
There’s a scene of his rehearsing a chorus for Candide’s “Make Our Garden Grow,” a wonderful choice. Felicia looks on admiringly. Lenny, too, is carried away, pouring his whole fiber into the piece, done a cappella. There’s the Prelude to West Side Story, played over a scene of Felicia in the park (in Massachusetts where the couple had their summer residence), with Lenny driving up in his pale blue convertible (and with R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World” heard on the car’s radio) with another lover. Lenny waves to Felicia and embraces his youngest daughter by the poolside. But the perspective is off, the angle is all wrong, a non sequitur.
Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) leading the chorus in “Make Our Garden Grow” from ‘Candide’
Felicia tries to get him to clear up the rumors to his daughter Jamie of his seeing other men. Lenny, for his part, is willing to spill the beans about his sexual proclivities, but Felicia insists he keep it to himself. “Don’t you dare tell her the truth!” she emphasizes. And so, he doesn’t. He is most convincing in his denials. Again, what is the connection to the main storyline? It’s all random dialogue, arbitrary and without sufficient justification. But isn’t life that way? One has to wonder.
In most films, music is used as a means to unify the action, to add clarity or substance to a given work. But here, it beggars confusion amid silent shrugs of the shoulders, leaving audiences clueless as to what association a particular piece of music has to the action onscreen. Even to those familiar with Bernstein’s life and accomplishments, the film seems wanting, the emotions left at sea to cast about for explanations where, to be perfectly honest, none exist. This is all to Maestro’s deficit – and it’s a major one, next to the wandering screenplay (worked on by both Cooper and John Singer) that takes the viewer every which way except the path of coherence.
Lenny and Felicia continue to argue about his bringing the young man Thomas to their summer home to meet the kids. Should Lenny have done that? And why is this important in telling Bernstein’s overall story? Is this what Cooper and Singer labored so valiantly to bring to the screen? Could Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese have done a better job of it, or taken a different path? Both ended up as executive producers on the project, and both had been penciled in to lead it, prior to giving up the reins to Cooper.
Cooper, for his part, has released a major motion picture that morphed into a passion project. Seeing Cooper on the CBS Sunday Morning program with the three surviving Bernstein children, Jamie, Alexander and Nina, one grasps the simple fact that he was emotionally attached and committed to capturing Lenny’s intense but troubled relationship with Felicia, along with the conductor’s family dynamic. You can see and feel the rapport he had with the adult siblings, it is that palpable.
Bernstein leading the orchestra and chorus in the conclusion to Mahler’s Symphony No. 2
Given all the above, there’s decidedly too much of the “man” and not nearly enough of the “artist.” For instance, Mass was one of Bernstein’s most accessible “serious” works and is given prominence later on, but audiences are left wondering as to the point of it all. As is the climax to Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, subtitled the “Resurrection,” the reenactment of which captures much of its inner fire and spiritual heft, but lacks the framework needed to provide clarity as to why this specific sequence matters for today’s audiences. Yes, it’s a magnificent effort but to what end?
Gustav Mahler, an Austro-Bohemian Jew who converted to Catholicism later in life, lived in difficult times and experienced similar issues (as Bernstein surely had) between his art and his religion, his troubled marriage to the lovely Alma Mahler, and his pursuit of a conducting career contrasted with his composing works of unimaginable emotional breadth and purpose. He could be the model for our modern-day Mahler, that is, our own Leonard Bernstein. Then why not do a film about Mahler? Well, one reason is that Ken Russell had done it before in 1974 (and none too successfully).
The last third of Cooper’s film is taken up with Felicia’s bout with and treatment of cancer, leading to her poignant passing (based on the surviving siblings’ account). This segues briefly into Bernstein’s teaching conducting classes to young aspirants, with his impulsive unruliness moderated somewhat for that final frame. For indeed, the remaining few minutes of Maestro return Leonard Bernstein to the beginning of the end, where he is being interviewed about his life and work.
The older Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) in ‘Maestro’ (2023)
With that characteristic gleam and twinkle in his eyes and that wrinkled, wizened expression we know so well from his many television and concert appearances, a slightly irritated and prematurely older Lenny turns directly to the camera (but not to the audience) and asks, quizzically: “Any questions?”
Oh, yes! About several dozen or more! Only, we will never get the chance to ask them. One must look elsewhere for the answers.
Copyright © 2024 by Josmar F. Lopes
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