Maestro, review: Bradley Cooper is dizzyingly good in this knockout Bernstein biopic
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The big, honking problem with Maestro – Bradley Cooper’s long-planned biopic of the conductor Leonard Bernstein – was, per the early buzz, as plain as the nose on its star-slash-writer-slash-director’s face. When a trailer was released earlier this year, social media bristled at the prospect of a non-Jewish actor using facial prosthetics to play a Jewish figure. Not an issue, shot back Bernstein’s own children, all three of whom had been involved with the project. “Bradley chose to use makeup to amplify his resemblance,” they said, “and we’re perfectly fine with that.”
It’s hard to stress just how unfortunately cut that trailer turned out to be. Cooper’s nose doesn’t just look natural, but wholly inconspicuous: in a film whose every frame is crammed with sumptuous, show-offy craft, it virtually qualifies as a background detail. Maestro is the first film the Hangover star has directed since his tremendous 2018 reimagining of A Star is Born – and while it lacks that picture’s stoutly carpentered emotional thump, it more than makes up for it in head-spinning ambition and ravishingly staged individual scenes. When we critics complain that studio pictures don’t take risks any more, Maestro is exactly the sort of film we wish they’d make instead. Not everything in it lands cleanly, but even its misses excite, and its direct hits are knockouts.
With returning cinematographer Matthew Libatique, Cooper has made the mind- and eye-boggling decision to shoot and stage Maestro’s two halves in completely different styles. Happily, both are gorgeous. The early portions of Bernstein’s adult life are captured in glittering black and white, and played in the style of an urbane comedy from classical Hollywood, with Cooper suavely tripping around the place like Herbert Marshall. Then, as the plot leaps forward to the late 1960s, the vibe switches to the heightened naturalism of Robert Altman: rich autumnal colours, overlapping dialogue and shot compositions of almost cubist complexity.
Cooper opens with a quote from Bernstein about the meaning of art lying in its contractions, which was clearly a guiding principle here. Perhaps a little like Oppenheimer, or last year’s Marilyn Monroe film Blonde, Maestro is less of a conventional biopic than an epic Humpty Dumptification of its subject: smash, crash, look, here are the bits, now do your best.
Its focus is the complexity of the marriage between Bernstein (who was gay) and his actress wife Felicia – wonderfully played by Carey Mulligan in a performance that, like Cooper’s, slyly shifts between old and new Hollywood acting styles. Both leads are stunningly good, deploying incredible technical precision in terms of accent work, ageing and emotional control – and only in a handful of later scenes, once Felicia falls ill, does it ever feel at all like a showcase.
Take the Thanksgiving argument at the couple’s Manhattan apartment. Ordinarily this sort of stuff would be shot in trembling Oscar-clip close-up. Instead, Cooper films it at a cool remove, undercutting the rancour by having an enormous Snoopy balloon bob past the window in the parade outside. For an actor-director, there’s an admirable lack of vanity here: Cooper always puts his faith in the shots first and foremost. An extended sequence in which Bernstein conducts Mahler’s 2nd in Ely Cathedral is shot with minimal fuss, yet is completely transporting – I loved the view of the strings players’ bows poking up exhaustedly from the orchestra at the end, like a battalion on its last legs still holding their halberds aloft.
Maestro also puts its audience through their paces. But as Cooper swipes and clutches his baton like he’s about to use it to commit hara-kiri, you’ll relish every exuberant thrust and jab.
On Netflix now
