★★★★★
Bradley Cooper’s Maestro opens with a quote from its subject, the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein. “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them.”
It’s a defiant statement from a movie that first appeared at the Venice Film Festival in September in a torrent of accusations that the director-star Cooper, who wears a prosthetic nose to play Bernstein, is guilty of “Jewface” (Bernstein was Jewish, Cooper is not), and “gayface” (Bernstein was a closeted gay man) — and presumably “not-an-actual-conductor-or-composer-face”.
Cooper’s answer to all this? He delivers an extraordinarily beautiful film, by turns heartbreaking, tragic and tender, constructed around two incessantly committed and career-high performances. The first is his own, a beguiling barnstormer that makes a virtue of the make-up, allowing him to disappear entirely inside character. Only once, while singing expressively during a choral session, does the latex let him down, crinkling oddly on either side of the mouth. Mostly, though, Cooper’s Bernstein is energised to the hilt as a staring, smiling, jabbering sensualist who’s so desperate to explode the limits of life that he’s often ignorant to the collateral damage he causes.
• How accurate is Maestro? Leonard Bernstein’s children on the biopic
The other performance that counts is from Carey Mulligan as Bernstein’s tough, caring and long-suffering wife, Felicia Montealegre. She begins as an exotic creation, all languid looks and long Chilean vowels. She ends embittered, emotional, embattled but full of forgiveness. At this early stage in awards season, the best actress Oscar is Mulligan’s to lose.
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And don’t worry, kids, there’s plenty of identity politics up front. In the late Forties, when Bernstein’s star is rising and he meets Montealegre, they enjoy juicy discussions in luscious black-and-white frames about self-created cultural identities, the legacy of a Jewish heritage and the restrictions of sexual norms.
“The world wants us to be only one thing, and I find that deplorable!” says Cooper’s Bernstein, flagging his own sexual orientation with a wry Wildean touch. The script, co-written by Cooper, is littered with gems.
Then it’s on to more important things, such as Bernstein’s era-spanning 27-year marriage to Montealegre and his ultimate evolution from the gifted showman behind West Side Story (sparingly referenced here) to something much more profound.
The relationship is exquisitely handled, slowly building amid smiling denial, giddy cocktail parties and family gatherings. It’s a partnership of deep love but also suffocating dishonesty, and it finally implodes (now in colour) with a Thanksgiving Day tirade from Montealegre that includes the line, “Your truth is a f***ing lie!” In a lovely directorial touch, the intensity of the scene is punctured by the appearance at the window of Bernstein’s apartment of a giant floating Snoopy from the parade below.
Cooper’s direction has evolved spectacularly since his 2018 debut, A Star Is Born. That Lady Gaga cheese-fest has not aged well and, especially in the shadow of Maestro, resembles an overindulgent pop promo that Cooper needed to get out of his system, like an intestinal blockage, before he could tackle this.
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All frames are expertly arranged and artfully deployed. An early swooping drone shot around a Carnegie Hall interior has a fantastical quality, while a later dream ballet set to Bernstein’s On the Town score allows Cooper a nod to MGM musicals while reinforcing the central dramatic tension — in the ballet Bernstein is torn between Montealegre and some seriously hunky sailors.
Bernstein’s creative journey is also deftly orchestrated by Cooper, climaxing with a 1973 performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony at Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire. The sequence is six minutes and 21 seconds long and, claims the actor-director, took six years of practice to perfect. Recorded live on set with the London Symphony Orchestra, it is the culmination of Cooper’s performance too, and depicts his tortured subject finally flying free in musical ecstasy. Everything coalesces magnificently. Cooper the director dissolves into Bernstein the conductor (conducting is akin to directing) via Cooper the actor until the entire film moves to a place of perfection, where sound, image and dramatic process find harmony, even transcendence. Few films reach this place — the final sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey is close. It’s no wonder, then, that when Montealegre approaches Bernstein after the performance, she sees him fully transformed and whispers, “There is no hate in your heart.”
This is a film of dauntless ambition, obvious admiration and sweet, overwhelming love.
15, 129min
In cinemas now; on Netflix from December 20
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