Encore Fatigue — Maestro review

A version of this appeared in The Scotsman.

Everything’s a performance in co-writer/director/star Bradley Cooper’s decades-spanning Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro. From Cooper’s much-debated prosthetic schnoz to the screwball pace of the dialogue to the way the film jumps between gorgeous black-and-white and rich colour, Bernstein’s life is presented almost as if it’s one big concert, its exuberant protagonist feeding hungrily off the energy of anyone in his orbit.

It’s an appropriate way to approach such a towering figure, best remembered these days for composing West Side Story, but in his day a cultural colossus who helped make classical music accessible to the masses. The film presents him as a musical polymath, a restless spirit whose enormous success as a conductor, a teacher and a television personality risked undermining his development as a composer — the addictive pull of his public persona in constant battle with the introspection required to create great work. His personal life was no less schizophrenic. He was a man of omnivorous sexual appetites, unapologetically drawn to men and women, never personally tortured by his sexuality, but leaving a trail of emotional devastation in his wake, not least his wife and muse, the Costa Rica-born stage actress Felicia Montealegre.

Played with brittle austerity by the very English Carey Mulligan, she’s introduced to Lenny (every one calls him Lenny) at a cocktail party, but in a portent of the marriage to come, Cooper has them fall in love on a literal stage — performative heterosexuality destined to be enacted many times over, with less and less conviction. The early parts of the film are awash with dazzling flights of fancy that merge this nascent marital arrangement with Lenny’s fizzing creativity. Yet it soon becomes apparent Cooper is less interested in Bernstein’s art than he is in tracking Lenny’s growing disinterest in containing the chaos caused by his creative and sexual duality.

Mostly this plays out in relation to Felicia. At one crucial performance, for instance, we see her edged into the wings, a shadowy figure no longer basking in the spotlight of his attention. When the film’s second half jumps ahead in time and to colour, discretion goes out the window, with Cooper framing one terrible domestic argument against the backdrop of a Thanksgiving day parade, replete with a giant Snoopy inflatable drifting by their lavish apartment. Even marital discord is conducted with flair.

The basic point Cooper seems to be circling is that their relationship wasn’t black and white. Whatever deal Felicia made with herself to overlook her husband’s bisexuality, she also understood that he needed her more than he realised and all but sacrificed herself on the alter of his success. We don’t learn much more about her than this, nothing, certainly, about her politics or the activism so mercilessly mocked for posterity by Tom Wolfe in his infamous essay Radical Chic.

Nevertheless, Cooper builds the film’s emotional climax around Bernstein’s implicit realisation that the virtuosic performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 that he conducted at Ely Cathedral in 1973 was only possible because of what Felicia gave him, even if it’s never clear what exactly that was. Shot in a single six-minute take, the scene itself is a tour de force and, had Cooper ended the film there, Maestro would have brought the house down.

But in pandering deference to Mulligan (to whom he also gives top billing) , what should have been a line or two of text detailing Felicia’s fate is instead transformed into an extended coda of Oscar-bating awfulness. Underscoring her martyrdom to her marriage, we get scene after scene of her decline from cancer, all of it beatifically rendered with wan smiles and decorous headscarves, and swiftly followed by more scenes of Cooper in crinkly old-age make-up, still joyful, yet haunted now by all that he’s lost, R.E.M.’s Bernstein-referencing It’s The End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine) needle-dropped, inevitably, onto the soundtrack.

It’s a little much, a performance too far basking in the false glory of a self-generated ovation.