Movie review: Passionate 'Maestro' becomes overwhelming

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 22 (UPI) -- Maestro, in theaters Wednesday, makes a valiant effort to avoid the usual tropes of biographical dramas. Unfortunately, it leaves out the good parts, too.

A mournful elder Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) flashes back to his early days. At 25, Bernstein had the opportunity to fill in for conductor Bruno Walter, and his career took off.

The film explores Bernstein's bisexual relationships. He had a male lover, David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer) at the time he met the woman he ultimately married, Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan).

Maestro avoids cliche biopic moments, like showing exactly where Bernstein got the inspiration for a certain classic work. Yet, Maestro still goes through Bernstein's life in chronological order, which makes some of the abstract choices confusing.

The film never indicates the date of any scene. The style changes from black and white to color and other effects of old Hollywood film, but leaves it up to the viewer to figure out when in Bernstein's life the film has arrived.

A quote from Bernstein about art asking more questions than it answers opens the film. Bernstein probably intended to provoke more significant questions than "what year is this?"

Makeup ages Bernstein and Montealegre, and they have kids who grow up, but it wouldn't have broken the rhythm to simply put the year on the screen. A Bernstein scholar probably would recognize the milestones.

Maestro is not very welcoming to Bernstein neophytes, who are presumably the ones to whom the film should want to engage with the artist. It feels more like being trapped in a conversation that is not filling one in. Which piece is he conducting now? Which show is this? Why is it important?

While the career highlights are left for audiences to Google (something they can do while watching on Netflix), it does include scenes such as when Boston Symphony conductor Serge Koussevitsky (Yasen Peyankov) suggests Bernstein shorten his name to Berns.

So, if trivia like that was important to the film, there's no reason identifying the symphonies, musical pieces or years would have been distasteful. The "Leonard Bernstein" snippet of R.E.M's "It's the End of the World As We Know It" is heard on a radio, which also begs more questions about its inclusion.

It shows he was big enough to become a song lyric, but was he happy about his inclusion? Did R.E.M. have to clear his name?

Maestro takes Bernstein's career for granted to focus on his personal life. That's a valid perspective, but it should still explain the career that's going on in the background.

Bernstein's film work as the composer of On the Waterfront's score and music in musicals On the Town and West Side Story are blended into dance montages. Co-writer and director Cooper constructs scene transitions taking Bernstein and Montealegre from meetings into dream-like dance numbers.

And yet, twice in the film, Bernstein gives an interview in which the reporter recaps his career. It would be far more effective to show the audience some of those milestones rather than just having someone off camera announce them.

The black-and-white section of the film does boast some classical Hollywood composition and striking silhouettes of the performers. Cooper and cinematographer Matthew Libatique move the camera assuredly to let scenes play out.

For at least the first half of the movie, Bernstein and his friends are laughing in every conversation like they're on nitrous oxide. Perhaps he was overcompensating for hiding his inner turmoil, but if anyone actually behaved like that they wouldn't have fooled anybody.

Though Montealegre accepts Bernstein's sexuality, Bernstein gets careless and starts kissing men in places he can be seen. Their college-aged daughter, Jamie (Maya Hawke), hears rumors of her father's sexual proclivities, which raises the point that even if Monteanegre agreed to this arrangement, their kids didn't.

Cooper is wildly expressive while conducting. He conveys Bernstein's passion when teaching students, too. Mulligan exhibits a full range of emotion from passionately supportive to utter despair.

A lot of technical nuance went into the intricacies of making a movie theater sound like the center of an orchestra, but at a certain point all of those subtleties just become loud. The music moves between theater speakers to capture the Leonard Bernstein experience, but the sound is assaulting.

There's no denying Maestro is exactly the film Cooper intended to make. Cooper followed his distinct artistic impulses, but those aesthetic choices are bound not to work for every viewer.

Maestro will stream on Netflix starting Dec. 20.

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.