'Maestro' briefing

2 ½ (out of 4)

            Oh geez Bradley I hope they can forgive you for this one! Listen, I don’t care for Cooper’s rock star regress in his own A Star Is Born, the man's acting has never really done it for me outside of Nightmare Alley, Licorice Pizza, The Place Beyond the Pines, Rocket Raccoon and maybe the David O. Russell collaborations, oh wait that’s not a bad profile, never mind. But for a movie about Leonard Bernstein, this might as well have been called CAREY MULLIGAN: The Movie, because you remove her, and there’s no calculated Oscar contender/pretender to speak of. “You don’t even know how much you need me, do you?” Carey utter as Felicia Montealegre… Cooper has admitted an awareness to just get out of his co-star’s way, be it Lady Gaga or now Mulligan who singlehandedly holds this film together and, my word, she’s not even turning in her best work (Promising Young Woman? Wildlife? The Great Gatsby? An Education? Take your pick). She’s a heaven-sent miracle worker — "What have we got, cancer melodrama? No sweat."

Regardless of reading across from Mulligan, Bradley had an uphill battle. Despite the assistance of controversially exaggerated prosthetic excellence (it wouldn’t be called antisemitic if that schnozz was a little more accurate), Cooper’s efforts add up to more than shy of a buck given a subject so many-splendored in his cultural significance. Cooper strives and struggles to marry his considerable abilities with a figure with whom he already bears a likeness but the mumbling, nasally 40s-diction is more distracting than protruding sniffers, bigger ears, bushier brows and a pronounced chin.

Watching someone imitate an icon is one thing but self-direction to top it off is another level of butt-scratching high-risk low-reward tomfoolery that I can’t get behind — there’s this crazy secondhand self-awareness, this heightened hellishness to it all. I’ll be damned if I can name one single other self-directed biographical movie, unless Citizen Kane's allusions to William Randolph Hearst count. His ego feels fairly removed, more than I believe haters think (there's less self-consciousness than A Star Is Born), but man, when Cooper’s doing his sweatiest, most vein-throbbing baton-waving, he’s losing just about everybody divorced from some orchestra nerd pointing out a missed beat — you practiced years for these few minutes and this is it? As Laurence Olivier said to Dustin Hoffman (for Marathon Man), “My dear boy why don’t you just try acting?”

But let’s just consider the facts, see if I have any questions: everyone hates this movie, especially those who haven’t seen it — for film twitter or zoomers this is Oscar bait in its purist distilled form, a vacuum for all things true concerning people let alone movies. With backing by both Spielberg AND Scorsese plus Netflix distribution, this is a real enough movie, one Steven even cued up for Bradley after an early screening of A Star Is Born (all told at least a decent update on the ’76 version, the trash one with Streisand and and Kristofferson). As much as I want to go to bat for Bradley, it’s hard to act as if Maestro is actually a home run or some misunderstood movie — we’re dealing with very textbook filmcraft. At its best it’s really evoking the desired style — the blockier B&W is a fairly brilliant simulation of the past, and even in modern color the distinguished makeup work still hold things up, not to mention the way the film mostly, wisely incorporates the prolific composer’s many compositions into the fray. It’s only cloying or deadening when they need to throw his influence right in your face, like that terrible not-quite-dream-scenario-homage to On the Town. The film has subtler ways to make note of Bernstein’s musical breadth without stooping to silly, showy theatrics contradicting the more insular, tasteful, patient moments in earlier life (aside from a few contemporary, far too fluid match cuts that could never pan out back in the day).

Largely Cooper manages to extract some intimacy from a grandiose, drug ’n’ desire fueled life, so much so I can applaud the movie for getting deep into his pivotal, strained marriage considering all the extra-marital and extra-sexual affairs. But like, say, Mank, this is a film with fine dialogue, fairly faultless direction and by all accounts winning, well-worn acting that nonetheless feels like it needs to explore everything BUT the inner soul, like respectively what screenwriting or the composition process means in cinematic terms, what it feels like when “summer sings in you.” Cooper ain’t no Fincher for that matter.

Not only can I accept more of this historical timeline ping-ponging — both Oppenheimer and Maestro use of color and lack thereof for future or past — but Nolan’s latest film was actually meant to “provoke questions” (as Maestro’s opening quotation from Bernstein indicates you were after) whereas Maestro is basically there to answer them, if well-dressed wiki-summary simplicity and bio bullet points is good for you. I’ve had it with the “new, unconventional” biopic ending up just as more of the same — for as much as Andrew Dominik’s Blonde leaves plenty to be desired (and is barely a biopic), that strange, sullen, schizophrenic style would’ve suited Maestro’s ode to a noteworthy jack of all trades. Cooper wants to be both reverent and critical but Maestro isn’t much of either — it gets very close to covering the “grand inner life“ that Bernstein had but the script can’t stop recounting his deeds and bringing up that crucial fill-in conducting job when he was 25. Still the screenplay is a palatable, pretentious portrait of the artist as a sorta gay man and at least the naturalistic, overlapping dialogue makes it more genuine for me, shedding stagey pomp and circumstance for more believable back and forth.

My contrarian ass desperately would like to rally behind an unfairly maligned movie relatively full of graces, good performances and handsome technical attributes but Jesus, all the careful consideration in the world can’t remedy a life-snapshot that is inevitably forced, a little full of itself and somehow soundly un-cinematic. Once time takes Mulligan out of frame, there’s nothing left but that REM reference and continuing to watch Bernstein fuck around with his students. WHAT A LEGEND!