Maestro - Review: A Few Notes Short of a Symphony

 

As the world turns, so does another drama film about the life of a famous artist release right around the Oscars season. This time, we have “Maestro,” chronicling the life of Leonard Bernstein directed by, produced by, co-written by, and starring Bradley Cooper (“A Star is Born (2018),” “The Hangover”). 

The film follows, on a broad scale, Bernstein’s life and marriage to Felicia Montealegre, played by Carey Mulligan (“An Education,” “Promising Young Woman”), with Bernstein played by Cooper. Throughout the picture, we see the various states of their marriage, with Bernstein’s infidelities along with his alcohol and substance abuses putting a strain on their marriage, along with Felicia’s breast cancer, all bookended with an interview with an elderly Bernstein. 

As his second film as a director, one would expect Cooper would want to expand his talents and abilities further. Go big or go home, so to speak. However, with “Maestro” something quite interesting is going on. As the film progresses, it gets more interesting in its depictions of Bernstein (although even as its most interesting, it's still lacking a bit). But as the film gets more interesting, the complexity and styling of its technical aspects becomes more plain. 

The cinematography from Matthew Libatique (“Requiem For A Dream,” “Birds of Prey”) is excellent for about the first third of the film before it eventually turns into a far more traditional and flat technique of shooting a drama. The decision to use only Bernstein’s music throughout the film instead of any kind of a traditional score is a good one but does grow plain by the film’s end as well.  

Cooper does a fine job, but some of the best moments are simply him overacting, creating a weird tonal balance that sometimes has great nuance and sometimes has all the subtlety of an SNL impersonation. The makeup is also a double-edged sword, as sometimes it really works and brings an authenticity to his performance and the rest of the time it just looks like a big rubber nose hanging off of Cooper’s face. The good news is that Mulligan is absolutely exceptional. Her performance so eclipses Cooper’s that it almost feels like maybe the film was crafted to showcase her talents rather than his. She’s simply exceptional. 

It’s a fantastic looking film, not just from a cinematography standpoint. The costumes and set designs are fantastic, lending a great sense of authenticity and mood to the piece. Throughout Cooper also flips between various aspect ratios and color schemes to further enhance that period mood, and it's very effective. It’s a very moody, atmospheric, pretty film that unfortunately is betrayed by its slow crawl towards plainness and Cooper’s uneven performance. 

The script also doesn’t help either. Co-written by Cooper and Josh Singer (“First Man,” “Spotlight”), it boils a lot of Bernstein’s life down its barest building blocks, almost to a soap opera level of melodrama. While Cooper and Mulligan do the best they can, it does end up boiling a lot of Bernstein’s life down to a “gay man cheats on his wife but boy does he still love her” kind of cliche. Its best moments are ones that lean far more into the purely visual aspects, making use of Libatique’s cinematography, production design, and actor’s expressions more than the dialogue. 

In a genre as overstuffed as the music biopic, it is refreshing to see one as complicated as this. “Maestro” does manage to establish itself as a gorgeous film on multiple levels, led by two performances that captivate, even if one doesn’t hold up as well. There’s also something weirdly interesting to see a film like this focus on a composer instead of a rock star or more traditionally forward-facing musician. For all those interesting elements, it's a shame the film’s script and general “Oscar bait” vibe betray those otherwise interesting elements, leaving the film feeling weaker and limper than Cooper clearly desires. 3.5/5