There’s a scene in Bradley Cooper’s sophomore directorial effort Maestro that perfectly captures what I view as the fundamental problem with this film. In the scene, Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) and Felicia Montealegre (Mulligan) are having a passionate argument with each other about how exhausting he is to be around, and it’s shot in one continuous take and from a distance. It’s an engrossing scene that both looks great and features some fine performances from its two leads, but the camera being far away from its focal points serves as an accidental reminder that so little of this has any intimacy, despite how pretty it looks and how showy it loves to be.
In fact, most of this is frustratingly superficial. I didn’t know anything about Leonard Bernstein before the movie started, and by the end of the film’s 131 minute runtime, I don’t feel like I knew much about him afterward. Cooper chooses to focus the most on his marriage to Montealegre, which is a fine decision in theory, but I don’t feel like he or anyone else involved came even close to trying to express what they clearly wanted to. Even with regards to the composing, I have no idea what made Bernstein stand out as a composer from anyone else.
I seriously question why Bradley Cooper even chose to make this movie. If I had to guess, it’s because he clearly wants an Oscar VERY badly. I mean, why else does anyone make biopics these days? There are a lot of fine impersonations, but this still plays out like a glorified, handsomely mounted reenactment of a Wikipedia page rather than any compelling drama. While the makeup is generally impressive, I found Cooper’s prosthetic nose and chin to be incredibly distracting, and this is definitely one of those performances where it’s hard not to focus on an actor “acting”. It is the very definition of Oscar bait, right down to the one word title with a double meaning.
The best performance in the film by a mile is Mulligan’s, but I found her dialogue to be very unnatural and grating. Truth be told, I don’t know if this is how Montealegre actually spoke in real life, but it sounds overly elegant and posh and made it feel like I was watching a caricature born from someone’s imagination rather than what seems real. It’s fitting that one of the first scenes between Bernstein and Montealegre is a tender moment where the two rehearse lines from one of her upcoming performances, which is also accidentally symbolic for how annoyingly superficial all of this really is. Make no mistake, this is little else than a vehicle for Cooper’s and Mulligan’s obvious and undeniable talents, and it’s also crystal clear that Cooper wants an Oscar rather desperately.
And speaking of compelling drama, I can’t for the life of me figure out what the actual conflict of this movie or Bernstein’s life is. He was clearly a gifted artist who devoted his life to it and was extremely successful by every measurable way of defining the word, and, despite some of his personal shortcomings, never seemed to be at any real risk of losing any of the things this success brought him. That being said, none of what I’ve said about this film is enough to make me not root for Bradley Cooper, both in front of and behind the camera as well. With his debut A Star is Born, he proved himself as a filmmaker who absolutely has the capability of mining raw emotional power from the text, but while this might represent what is debatably a formal improvement over his debut, this has almost none of the impact that film had. A disappointment, but I will always be interested in what Cooper decides to do next.
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