[In Maestro, Bradley Cooper plays famed conductor Leonard
Bernstein but leaves out the complicating — and fascinating —
real-life details for a more streamlined, tearjerking product. It’ll
doubtlessly do well at the Oscars. ]
[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

LET BRADLEY COOPER’S MAESTRO BE THE DEATH OF THE BIOPIC  
[[link removed]]


 

EILEEN JONES
December 23, 2023
Jacobin
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ In Maestro, Bradley Cooper plays famed conductor Leonard Bernstein
but leaves out the complicating — and fascinating — real-life
details for a more streamlined, tearjerking product. It’ll
doubtlessly do well at the Oscars. _

Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan in Maestro. , (Netflix / Youtube)

 

I like Cary Mulligan and always find her very winning. She kept me
somewhat engaged in the new biopic _Maestro_, now on Netflix after
its theatrical run, playing Felicia Montealegre, the life partner of
composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. He’s played by Bradley
Cooper, who generally has the opposite effect on me, losing me
completely.

And he’s never lost me so completely as he did in his last
writing-directing-starring effort, _A Star is Born_ (2018), which
was so horribly botched I couldn’t wait for his character to die and
get out of Lady Gaga’s way. So I didn’t have high hopes
for _Maestro,_ though it’s getting many of the usual mindless
critical raves accorded to apparently serious-minded, end-of-year,
Oscar-bait films with high production values and shiny names attached.
Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese are producers on this one, and
the three Bernstein children were heavily involved in its development.
By announcing their strong approval of the film, they helped get it
through the bad publicity of the “Jewface” scandal
[[link removed]],
which was catalyzed by the revelation of the prosthetic nose Cooper
wore in order to more closely resemble Leonard Bernstein.

The three Bernstein children’s involvement is probably why it seems
that crucial aspects of their parents’ lives were censored or
glossed over. That should be a filmmaker’s rule — never seek the
cooperation of family if you want to make a good biopic. They’re
sure to want a more blandly conventional and affirming version of the
much spikier life story.

 

As you watch _Maestro_, you keep thinking that there _has_ to be
more to these people’s lives than this, especially after an early
scene about their multifaceted characters and backgrounds and
endeavors. In an exposition dump that you have to see to believe,
scintillating Leonard Bernstein meets dazzling Felicia Montealegre at
a fabulous 1940s house party in New York City, and each describes the
other’s many sidedness in terms of birthplace, regional and ethnic
origins, religion, education, career choice, and so on. Leonard says
this makes them fated for adventurous lives that pose a challenge to
provincial American culture. And he suggests that they’re made for
each other.

The central problem in all this love at first sight stuff
in _Maestro_ is that Leonard is pretty openly bisexual, and when
Felicia becomes aware of this, she agrees that their marriage can
accommodate his need to have sex with men as long as he’s discreet
about it. And Bernstein is anything but discreet, so she suffers
increasing anguish for years until finally the marriage breaks down
and they live separate lives for a few years. Her diagnosis of cancer
in 1976 reunites them, and Bernstein remains with her until her death
in 1978.

That’s how the film handles their stories. There are far edgier
biographical complexities that are barely touched on or ignored
altogether, but they’re being aired
[[link removed]] in
many reviews and articles published in response to the film. They
include the fact that Leonard had affairs, some of them lengthy,
intense, and apparently meaningful, with both men and women during his
engagement and marriage to Felicia. Also, Felicia was aware of his
other relationships very early on. Leonard sought psychotherapy to
deal with what were then widely regarded as “deviant” desires. His
engagement to Felicia dragged on for years while he delayed marrying
her, due to both the glamorous commitments of a booming career and his
complicated love life. She finally broke it off and had a long
relationship with the actor Richard Hart — who appears very
fleetingly in one scene of the film. Hart’s untimely death then
reunited Leonard and Felicia, who finally married.

It was Leonard’s lengthy and open relationship with Tommy Cothran,
who collaborated with him on his 1971 symphonic composition
“Mass,” that finally pushed the marriage to the breaking point.
Tommy is seen here and there in the film as a sweet, long-haired, and
mostly nonspeaking figure played by Gideon Glick, though he’s
practically a live-in guest and accompanies the Bernstein family on
vacations. According to a moving piece by Peter Napolitano, who was in
a relationship with Tommy Cothran at the time of his death from AIDS
in 1986, Leonard was given an ultimatum by Felicia and made to choose
between her and Tommy. He chose Tommy. Leonard left him to return to
Felicia only when she was stricken with cancer.

Eight years after her death, Leonard visited Tommy on his deathbed, at
the same time as Peter Napolitano was saying farewell. Napolitano
ultimately felt that Tommy and Leonard’s relationship was the more
crucial one, and left the two of them alone together for a last,
tearful goodbye
[[link removed]].

I have to say, it’s baffling to me that anyone with an interest in
the drama of these people’s lives would’ve left out that farewell
scene. To have Bernstein suffer through his wife’s protracted
two-year dying agon, holding her in his arms as she expired, and then
eight years later make a brief but traumatizing one-time-only visit to
his other dying love, seems so intensely significant of the times and
Bernstein’s plight and also his crushing sense of guilt, it’s on
the emotional level of grand opera.

What’s the point of making all these biopics when obfuscating the
most interesting aspects of people’s lives seems built into the
genre?

Other areas of the Bernsteins’ lives are extremely interesting too,
and so of course they’re hardly mentioned in the film. Leonard’s
immense struggle to compose “serious music,” which wasn’t always
well received, is dealt with in a spotty way in the film but gets
overwhelmed by his career triumphs. The way the Leonard and Felicia
negotiated his Jewish heritage and her Catholicism is another fraught
area of their lives together.

And I assume it’s no surprise to discover that their leftist
political organizing is entirely ignored. Especially Felicia’s
intense activism, which included protesting the Vietnam War and
working for the civil rights movement. This led eventually to her
support for the Black Panthers, which created quite a scandal. The
party she hosted in 1970, very successfully, to raise funds for
several Panthers in prison whose bail had been set ridiculously high,
became the subject of a famous Tom Wolfe poison-pen takedown
[[link removed]] in _New
York _magazine called “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.”

This party and the backlash against the Bernsteins that resulted was
practically made for a movie. So naturally it’s not there, in spite
of all that big talk at the beginning of the film about what unusual,
brave, and freedom-seeking people Leonard and Felicia were. What
better illustration could there be of how the “provincial culture”
of America — even the upscale Bohemian version of it, which might be
expected to be a bit more sophisticated — would punish people for
their attempt at liberated lives?

What’s the point of making all these biopics when obfuscating the
most interesting aspects of people’s lives seems built into the
genre? What are audiences getting out of these almost uniformly bland
and childishly censored products?

 

This is a movie that persistently represents Bernstein’s homosexual
relationships as selfish and unserious and drug addled and the
downfall of his “proper” life in a heterosexual marriage with
children. Even in the seemingly exhilarating scene late in the film,
after Felicia’s death, when Bernstein as an old man goes to a gay
club and dances ecstatically, he’s doing it in hellfire-red disco
lighting, and erotically close-dancing with his own student who looks
roughly fifty years younger than he is. Hell, _The Simpsons_ did a
more sophisticated version of this scene in an episode when Homer
Simpson finds love and understanding when he’s accepted as an
attractive “bear” by his new gay friends. Homer also dances
ecstatically in a gay club, with no signs of transgression
accompanying his moment of liberation.

Because _Maestro_ focuses so narrowly on one area of tension,
Mulligan as the neglected wife is forced to strike the same note of
gimlet-eyed resentment over and over until there’s no denying it
gets tiresome, for all her plaintive charm and undeniable acting
skill. At a certain point, you can’t help thinking, “For God’s
sake, woman, just _leave _him, don’t hang around looking ever more
severe and judgy as the wronged wife.”

But that’s Cooper for you. He did the same kind of whanging away on
one lugubrious note in _A Star is Born,_ which turned the whole
narrative away from the star actually being born, so we could wallow
in Cooper’s character’s alcoholic angst as the fading star and
ultimately self-sacrificing husband of the rising star. The thing that
director George Cukor had done so well with the earlier Judy Garland
version of _A Star is Born _(1954) was making the husband played by
James Mason into a figure of such complexity, he’s — all at once
— a sympathetic character and a monster and a hugely damaged but
self-aware man who knows he’s a monster and can’t stop himself and
even makes ironic jokes about it. That intricate characterization gets
systematically undone by Cooper in his version.

Why Cooper likes these oversimplified tales of star marriages with one
partner glorified while the other gets martyred is between him and his
god, or maybe his therapist. But here we go again in _Maestro_. Many
people will love this thing anyway. Just the shape of it is so crowd
pleasing, with its many sobby triumphal endings, trying to hit all the
mainstream crowd pleasing notes.

Husband and wife reunited! Group hugs with children! Husband, so often
creatively blocked, creates a big fat well-received symphony! Wife
dies! Husband freed to be his true gay self! But sad without wife, his
true love! Love and art, so embiggening! Only connect! The end!

_Maestro_ is an undeniable tearjerker, which is probably enough for
many viewers who have been trained, by now, to be overly impressed if
any American movie can have an emotional impact on them. I admit
Mulligan can always make me tear up — even at age thirty-eight, when
registering sadness, she still has the face of a bewildered child.

But damn, I resent being tear-jerked when the movie’s as lacking in
honesty, complexity, and maturity as this one is. It’ll get
nominated for many awards, I assume, for having exactly those faults.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE

Facebook  Twitter  Email

CONTRIBUTORS

Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of
the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.

* SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]]
* DONATE [[link removed]]

New issue coming soon. Subscribe to our print edition today.
[[link removed]]

* LGBTQ rights
[[link removed]]
* classical music
[[link removed]]
* Hollywood
[[link removed]]
* NETFLIX
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]