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Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein and and Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealegre in Maestro.
Jason McDonald/Netflix
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Jason McDonald/Netflix
Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein and and Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealegre in Maestro.
Jason McDonald/Netflix
The brand new biopic Maestro, directed by and starring Bradley Cooper, tells a nuanced story of the larger-than-life musician Leonard Bernstein. Whereas the enduring conductor, composer and instructor was the propulsive power in any room he walked into, this movie is a sympathetic, delicate portrait of his spouse, Felicia Montealegre Cohn, and their marriage.
Bernstein’s chaotic, irrepressible power at all times appeared to increase in 1,000,000 completely different instructions without delay. That is clear from his personal music for each the live performance corridor and the stage, which is cleverly woven out and in of this movie, in impact changing into its personal suite of characters. However the coronary heart of Maestro is the story of Felicia.
Born in Costa Rica and raised in Chile, Felicia is performed right here by Carey Mulligan, who captures Felicia’s patrician, pan-continental accent and steely resolve in a masterful efficiency. The true Felicia was a working actress when she met Leonard. She additionally knew, even early on, that he was bisexual — and that she was going to should ignore his facet relationships to tackle the position of a lifetime: Mrs. Maestro.
“What day are we dwelling in? One could be as free as one likes with out guilt or confession,” she tells him once they grow to be engaged. (In actuality, they turned engaged, broke it off, and finally determined to provide their relationship one other go.) “Please, what is the hurt?” she continues. “I do know precisely who you might be. Let’s give it a whirl.”
She did not simply give it a whirl: They have been married for greater than 25 years. Leonard Bernstein was an infamously messy human being, notably in his later years … and Cooper does not shrink back from that in Maestro. In a single scene, for instance, we see the elder statesman Bernstein instructing at Tanglewood — placing a far youthful conductor by means of his paces throughout a daytime teaching, then pawing on the similar younger man that evening on a hazy dance ground.
Cooper, who produced and co-wrote Maestro in addition to directing and starring in it, might simply have painted Bernstein as a narcissistic monster, just like the lead character in final 12 months’s movie Tar — however he does not. He does not fairly excuse him as a tortured genius, both. It is extra a portrait of a person who accommodates multitudes, and each the enjoyment and harm he casts on others. However the gravitational pull of Maestro is at all times the duet of Lenny and Felicia, no matter their relationship’s unusual rhythms.
One of many movie’s most rancid — and memorable — strains comes straight from their daughter Jamie’s 2018 memoir, Well-known Father Woman. Within the movie, Felicia and Lenny are combating of their fairytale condo overlooking Central Park West, simply as an enormous Snoopy floats by the window throughout the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. “In case you’re not cautious, you are going to die a lonely outdated queen,” she cries out.
(Years later, he tells a younger grownup Jamie, after she’s heard rumors about his dalliances, that they are all lies spurred by jealousy of his expertise.)
However together with all that sourness, there may be additionally sweetness, equivalent to on this tender alternate: “I am considering of a quantity,” he says as she laughs and makes a number of fallacious guesses of their personal sport. “It is two, darling.”
“Two,” she solutions dreamily.
“It is two, like us, darling,” he says. “Like us, a pair. Two little geese in a pond.”
The movie brims with power from Bernstein’s early years, forged in black and white, to the tremendous color-saturated, drug-fueled Nineteen Eighties. Its dazzling visuals match the music — and sure, someplace in there, Maestro can also be a film about making music.
Cooper is not essentially the most plausible Bernstein, regardless of a prosthetic (and arguably problematic) nostril and make-up — the well-documented voice is not fairly proper, neither is its cadence. However Cooper nonetheless captures a good quantity of Bernstein’s dynamism, particularly as a conductor. In a single prolonged sequence in Maestro, he leads Mahler’s monumental Symphony No. 2 in a recreation of a well-known efficiency Bernstein carried out at England’s Ely Cathedral in 1973.
The digital camera rests on the conductor as Bernstein channels one among his personal heroes — and it is one of many longest, uninterrupted sequences of music on movie in current reminiscence, whereas Mahler’s epically scaled music washes over the viewer like a tidal wave.
That second seems like Bernstein’s final motive for being — and maybe the one alternative he has to flee himself.
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