Music and performances play second fiddle to director’s ambitions in flawed Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro

Biopics are a particularly interesting genre in cinema, as they often reveal something as meaningful about the filmmaker as they do about their subject. Raging Bull, one of the greatest of all films, is as scourging a view of Martin Scorsese himself, as it was of the boxer Jake LaMotta. And in Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola depicts her own inner world, under the guise of a portrait of the French queen.

Maestro, the new biopic on Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia Montealegre, is just as much about the ambition of Bradley Cooper (who co-wrote, directed and starred in the film) as it is about Bernstein’s life and artistry. The story centres on the marriage between the characters of Lenny – the great American composer-slash-conductor-slash-pianist-slash-educator-slash-irrepressible-bonanza-of-sound-and-cigarette-smoke – and Felicia (played by Carey Mulligan), a Costa Rican actress who starred on Broadway and television. And it’s a great show of an actorly and director-ish ostentation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJP2QblqLA0

Cooper and co-writer Josh Singer focus on the tensions in the marriage brought about by Lenny’s extramarital indiscretions (apparently only with men), Felicia’s truncation of her career to manage her husband’s domestic affairs and buffer his public image, and, finally, her illness. The core marital conflicts are so common as to be generic, and the aspects that make Felicia and her experiences special (as they indeed were, in real life) are hardly conceived in this film.

I was surprised – and disappointed – to find that Maestro elides more than an entire decade, by jumping from the mid-1950s to the early 70s, and skipping Bernstein’s directorship of the New York Philharmonic (as well as the Broadway run and film version of West Side Story). This was a critical time in Montealegre’s public life as well: on 14, January 1970, she threw a fundraiser for the Black Panther Party, which, among other things, gave rise to the snide term “radical chic”.

By ignoring so much, Cooper excludes enormous parts of who Montealegre was and what she did: her strong political positions, her worldview, her decisive actions, her public perception, her fullness as a bright and famous being. Maestro seems to narrow Felicia to simplistic, blaring talking points, and the deeper elements of her emotional life are only partly expressed in a scene of a heated argument, where most of it is not heard as Lenny talks over her, and it’s wrapped up in the contrived pathos of a Snoopy float.

Soul divided

Bradley Cooper reportedly spent six years learning to conduct, so that he could render the conclusion of Mahler’s Second Symphony live. (Image: Netflix)

The official poster for Maestro. (Image: Netflix)