Brad Cooper as the ‘Maestro’

by

A conductor is a sorcerer who conjures sound from silence, controlling the elements with his gestures, commanding the music with his wand. For Americans in the second half of the last century, Leonard Bernstein was classical music’s star sorcerer, the great illuminator of Mahler and Beethoven, yet his interests couldn’t be contained within the European canon. He left his most indelible impression on pop culture with the music for West Side Story.

Brad Cooper gives a convincing performance as Bernstein in the Oscar-nominated Maestro, and not only because of the prosthetic nose and make up that transform him into the conductor’s doppelganger. Cooper mastered the master’s physical exuberance as well as his smaller gestures. Cooper also directed and cowrote the film, which makes a swift pass across the conductor’s life from age 25 through the final years before his death in 1990. Maestro tells Bernstein’s story in a series of key episodes real or imagined while avoiding many of the cliches of music bio films. There are no childhood flashbacks, no long hard struggle to the top. Bernstein was thrust into the spotlight filling in for ailing conductor Bruno Walter at a Carnegie Hall broadcast. As for how music entered his life, the screenplay gives only the impression that his career choice was an act of rebellion against his uncaring, businessman father.

The story’s throughline concerns the tension between the contradictions of Bernstein’s life. He casually tells his future wife, Felicia (Carey Mulligan), of the “composite that enables me to be many things at once.” He was a gay man happily married for many years to a woman, the proud father of three children. He functioned gladly in many personal worlds, much as he dominated the concert stage, the TV studio and Broadway with more or less equal aplomb. According to the screenplay, he was torn between the extroverted performance of conducting and the introspection of composing. Addicted to music and cigarettes, he was outgoing, genuinely engaged with the people around him.

Maestro depicts the first decades of Bernstein’s public life in black and white cinematography before suddenly, circa 1970, going full color. Cooper’s color palette may have been determined by the way Bernstein is often remembered, especially from the “Young People’s Concerts” most viewers watched on black and white television sets. But the choice might also suggest the shadowland Bernstein inhabited, veiling the scope of his sexuality from the public. However, in other ways, Bernstein refused to hide. He ignored the advice from an esteemed colleague to conceal his Jewishness by changing his name to the WASPy Burns.

Mulligan plays Felicia with warmth and depth, worldly and tolerant in the black and white scenes, but increasingly nonplussed and eventually bitter in color. She grows jealous over Bernstein’s attraction to other men, and their marriage unravels angrily, but their love and friendship survives. Maestro won seven Oscars nominations, including Best Film, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Writing … and Best Makeup for the nose job that some critics with nothing better to think about found “controversial.” 

Maestro is streaming on Netflix.