If Walk Hard’s still-killer line ‘Dewey Cox has to think about his entire life before he plays’ slightly ruined all future musician biopics for you, Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biography Maestro has a novel answer. Yes, Maestro begins, as these things are practically obliged to do, with Bernstein (played by Cooper) as an old man reflecting, only this time out, it’s on his entire wife. As much love story as musical tribute, Maestro dives deep into Bernstein’s marriage to actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), their romance forming the bedrock of this handsomely made and well-acted but, ultimately, all too familiar epic.
Covering a massive swathe of Bernstein’s life, from 1939 to the late ‘80s, Maestro has a far greater sweep than Cooper’s superlative debut film, covering every major career milestone and marital hurdle and, though it allows for a mostly rollicking pace, this grand scope is ultimately at the detriment of emotional impact. There’s little here to match the pure punch and cringing devastation of the 2018 A Star Is Born and while Cooper and Mulligan both give some real Movie Star performances (ones that are sure to be honoured come awards season), there’s just a bit of a remove, especially in the final third, which succumbs particularly hard to the biopic formula.
That’s not to say that Lenny and Felicia are bad company, though. Cooper and Mulligan are charming as all hell, while Cooper and co-writer Josh Singer’s script, at least in the first half, grants them some real rat-a-tat dialogue. It’s fun and funny stuff that also allows Cooper to get reflective and self-critical as Bernstein bemoans his own lack of acting talent while waxing philosophic on the ‘schizophrenic’ push-pull dynamic between a private creative (see: Bernstein’s composing, Cooper’s directing) and a public one (Bernstein’s conducting, Cooper’s acting).
This first half is shot in a wonderfully expressive black-and-white, with the second half in rich and gorgeous colour, and it’s all brilliantly lensed by DOP Matthew Libatique. If there’s one thing that really sets Maestro above its award-season biopic peers (aside from the fact that it’s produced by both Scorsese *and* Spielberg), it’s in the visual work, Cooper and Libatique conjuring some genuinely stunning compositions and, even in the stylistically quieter moments, making great use of *space*. The frames here are deliberate and precise, boxed in by a classy-feeling square aspect ratio, Cooper stepping up further as a pure image-maker – in terms of recent actors-turned-directors he is in a class of his own when it comes to the pure craft of the discipline. Of course, the music is fantastic too, even if the showstopper conducting scene doesn’t have the same oomph as similar moments in recent musically-minded masterworks like Annette and Tar.
It’s not quite enough, though, to stop Maestro’s ending from just falling rather flat. After the first three-quarters barrelled through the story, here everything slows down and it’s for the worse, excitement turning to predictability and emotional crescendos not forceful enough. In terms of Cooper the visual director, Maestro is a clear step up from A Star Is Born, and, even if that does mean sacrificing raw impact, I’m excited to see what he does next – let’s just hope the third outing is the best of both worlds.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 