‘Maestro’ Review: Bradley Cooper’s Sophomore Film Hits All the Right Notes | Venice

Yet another complex relationship takes center stage in Bradley Cooper’s follow-up to A Star Is Born. The actor-director premiered his sophomore feature in Venice’s Official Competition: the Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro. We already know that Cooper is deeply fascinated by the intertwined clutch of life and art, a relation which drove the emotional storytelling of his debut feature. But what comes to the fore in Maestro and after this five-year gap between the two projects, is that he finds the contradictions of love (and art, by extension) even more inspiring. The famed conductor’s life was rich with both, and so Cooper decided to tell a love story in perpetual motion between exaltation and decay: the one between Bernstein (played by the director himself) and his wife Felicia Montealegre, an actress and activist played by Carey Mulligan.

The future couple met at a party in 1946 (depicted in the film as a wondrous spark) and married five years later. Consequently, the film portrays the 50s, 60s, and 70s and the highs and lows of their marriage before Felicia’s death in 1978. While the early days of their togetherness are shot in elegant black and white, the shift to vivid, grainy colors marks the mature years of their relationship, subverting the way one imagines the tint of a couple’s ‘honeymoon period.’ Form shapes the content’s emotional undercurrents in the way the film moves between times and spaces. At first, the ease of new love blossoming is mirrored in the imaginative continuity between disparate places, such as a character steppin out of frame to enter an empty opera in the next. Time and space are less permeable later in the film, when Lenny’s affairs with men become more prominent. His growing ease often leads him to parade ongoing relationships under his wife’s gaze.

Mulligan’s distinctive trait of vulnerability-as-composure (think of Wildlife or Drive where she played perturbed wives) matches the rascal energy of Cooper’s Lenny most of the time, but even if the chemistry is not always right, they meet perfectly in acts of affection and in fights. One particular outburst sees a secluded room become a battlefield of verbalized frustration quite late in the film, but the scene is handled superbly: relatively short, intense, and cut by the appearance of a Snoopy inflatable in the window frame to remind us that life must go on. Maestro goes softer on the fatalism every artistic biopic inherently carries within itself, thus relying less on the story itself, but on the way it’s told.

Since so much relies on the protagonist-duo, they share most if not all of the screen time. A Star is Born cinematographer Matthew Libatique often resorts to side and slightly lower angles to put one or the other in front, depending on how the power dynamic unfolds. At first the black and white part frames Lenny in the foreground, back facing the camera, while Felicia shines in a medium close-up shot. Her luminous energy reflects on everything and everyone, including the Maestro himself. He’s mesmerized enough to follow her to an empty playhouse in the middle of the night, rehearse lines with her, and accept the teasing for it. Years later, after their two engagements, marriage, and children, the tables have turned: everything’s in color, Lenny is in focus while his wife is at the sidelines. As he ages, Lenny becomes restless and irresponsible. 

In these scenes Cooper reveals his full potential to craft a character that can be judged and sympathized with just by the way he glides through lines and feelings, leaning on the ambivalence fuelling both. A lot of the film’s second part is set in the Bernstein house, but the scenes are of parties where, in a corner, behind a door, Mulligan’s taciturn look says it all, “I know you, I accept you, but you hurt me”. Hurt, for her, also involves the children, Jamie (Maya Hawke), Nina (Alexa Swinton), and Alexander (Sam Nivola), who are exposed to the truth and rumors about their father’s affairs. Felicia is a patient wife and a responsible mother, we gather as much only from the soft curves in Mulligan’s sorrowful smile.

Even if it relies on conventional devices, such as a retrospective framing of the story from the point of view of the future (the aged Bradley Cooper wears his shirt way too unbuttoned), or the uplifting, make-happy final shot, Maestro is the work of a confident, attentive director, supported by the likes of Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg who both bear producer credits. It’s not exactly surprising that an Oscar nominee can direct and star in a Netflix film like this one, and with such backing, but to some, Maestro will be a pleasant surprise. A tearjerker disguised as a biopic, it hits the right notes while also being true to its heart. Bring tissues: even if by some mysterious law the romance doesn’t move you, the splendid renditions of Bernstein’s own symphonies will take care of it.

Bernstein (or ‘Lenny’) was many things: a musician, conductor, composer, teacher, and author, but showing him as a husband, father and lover never really blurs the focus. Maestro is a tribute film to both him and Felicia, to his artistry, her support and his in turn. Making a celebratory biopic of a legendary figure often relies on beatification or victimization, but in this case, opting for an unconventional protagonist—not solely Lenny, but his and Felicia’s relationship—shows exactly how integrated art and life can be. And while they can and should influence each other, love, not fame, is the bond that holds them together.

Grade: B+

This review is from the 2023 Venice Film Festival. Maestro in select theaters on November 22 and on Netflix December 20.

Photo: Jason McDonald/Netflix