129 min | R | November 22, 2023 | Netflix
Bradley Cooper directs himself as Leonard Bernstein and spends two and a half hours chasing the great American conductor. The film cares less about the music than the marriage. It is a portrait of a genius told by the woman who had to live with him.
Maestro tracks Leonard Bernstein across decades, from his sudden 1943 debut conducting the New York Philharmonic to his decline. It refuses the standard music-biopic shape. There is no rise-and-fall through famous premieres and no education in how the man composed. The film fixes its attention on his marriage to Felicia Montealegre and on the cost of loving a man who needs the entire world to love him back. This is a movie about a wife watching her husband perform a version of himself for everyone in the room.
Carey Mulligan plays Felicia as a woman who chooses her own erasure and then resents the bargain she struck. She delivers the film’s hardest line standing in a hallway, accusing Bernstein of hatred, and she lets the accusation cost her something. Bradley Cooper plays Bernstein with a prosthetic nose and a constant hunger that never settles. He conducts the Mahler Resurrection Symphony in Ely Cathedral in a six-minute take that turns the body into the instrument. Matt Bomer plays David Oppenheim as the man Bernstein leaves behind, and the brief early scenes carry the weight of everything the marriage will later bury.
Cooper directs from a script he wrote with Josh Singer, and the most telling choice is the camera’s restraint. The early sequences are shot in black-and-white Academy ratio that boxes the characters into the frame. The film expands to color and widescreen as the years pass and the marriage contracts. Matthew Libatique’s cinematography stages the courtship as something close to a musical, with the couple dancing through a theater and onto a stage. The Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon drifting past the apartment window during a fight tells you the private misery and the public spectacle share the same address.
Maestro is more interested in being admired than in being honest about its subject. It treats Bernstein’s contradictions with a reverence that smooths their edges. The performances reach for something the screenplay will not fully grant them, because the writing protects the man it claims to examine. What remains is a handsome, controlled film about a marriage, anchored by Mulligan giving the picture more truth than it asks for.