No more convincing needed. I was optimistic about Bradley Cooper, the director, after A Star Is Born, but cautiously so, because that one was just ok. Like all great filmmakers though, Cooper’s learned from his mistakes, and improved his craft. The more ambitious Maestro also comes with a more ambitious Bradley Cooper, really elevating what could have been a run of the mill biopic into something really exciting and beautiful.
There’s plenty of Leonard Bernstein material out there in the public. One of America’s great composers, Bernstein famously also did scores for movies On the Town and West Side Story. Cooper’s story isn’t about Bernstein’s pop culture though: it’s about what happened off camera. Especially Lenny’s relationship with Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), a Costa Rican/Chilean actress who became the love of Bernstein’s life and a key source of inspiration for him.
Looks like Coop the director learned some new tricks! Using the plethora of Bernstein music, Cooper fuses his biopic with gorgeous, beautiful sound. Think Fantasia at times: we get a lot of I guess montages, but they almost feel like gorgeous moving art, evolving and changing as Bernstein’s music does, second to second. He couples that gorgeous sound with his lights and sets and even colors, moving from black and white to color, shadowed, then in the light, all naturally, as a person naturally evolves across their lifetime. Similar to Moonage Daydream last year, Bradley Cooper really tries to capture the essence of Leonard Bernstein. Like love, essence isn’t tangible and you kind of know it when you see it, and Cooper certainly put in the time to really make us feel a little bit what it must have been like to be in this man’s head.
The other thing I learned here: I have to take an L on Carey Mulligan. For a long time I thought she was overrated, overly praised for being in a great movie instead of being great herself. The last few years have disproved that theory, Maestro being the latest and best example. Cooper generously cedes the spotlight to Mulligan here, showing that behind the scenes, Felicia was the real conductor of the Bernstein empire. Over decades, Mulligan really makes it clear that Felicia was never wholly Mrs. Bernstein: she just did that while doing other things at the same time. More importantly, she saw Lennie for who he really was, and helped him fully realize himself so they could both grow and evolve together. Sometimes this was amusing, like an incredible sequence during the Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York, and sometimes this is really heartbreaking, like those last few years together. Mulligan nails every emotion, every line reading, every moment necessary for the movie to work, the emotional fulcrum of a movie defined by feelings.
Never forget before he was Sack Lodge, Bradley Cooper was a part of the Actor’s Studio Drama School. Using all those lessons he learned in school and at work, Cooper only gets better as he gets older. I look forward to more features from him, as his directorial stary only points upward. Or as Gaga might say, he’s off the deep end, watch as he dive’s in.