"Maestro"

 ☆☆☆☆ 

NOTE: It's almost impossible to fully determine my thoughts on Maestro, as the presentation I saw at the newly renovated Egyptian Theater in Hollywood seems to have been marred by audio problems. Though my first thought was to blame my own aging ears for difficulty in hearing an overwhelming amount of the film's dialogue, post-screening discussions with several audience members revealed that everyone I spoke with was frustrated by muddy, nearly incomprehensible dialogue. My overall estimation of the film may have been different if the dialogue had been clear.

After more than a year, I caught up recently with Damien Chazelle's Babylon, a film about Hollywood that manages to make black-and-white filmmaking look silly, antiquated and dull. Bradley Cooper's Maestro isn't about Hollywood, but it contains some of the most extraordinary black-and-white filmmaking I've ever seen on screen, just one example of the incredible technical prowess of the film that is never quite matched by the sometimes stilted and puzzling storytelling of its screenplay.

Early the film, a woman gets off a bus at night on a leafy suburban street. She walks toward the camera. It's a simple shot, but in Maestro it's a breathtaking moment in which light meets shadow to create a sensuous, mysterious, hypnotic image. It's fitting that the woman turns out to be an actress named Felicia Montealegre, who becomes the girlfriend and then wife of the already legendary conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein.

Felicia is played by Carey Mulligan in a performance that isn't just one of the best this year, it might be one of the best performances ever committed to film. Mulligan—and, it can be assumed by what Maestro tells us, Felicia herself—is a remarkable force, a vibrant, magnificent presence, an intoxicating blend of charm and persuasion. Mulligan seizes the film and refuses to let go, and every moment she's in it, Maestro is stunning and alive.

But this is, after all, not a film called Lenny & Felicia, though its screenplay sometimes falls into the predictable and mundane routine of a made-for-TV romance: artist meets muse, muse accepts artists for all his flaws, muse and artist have a rocky relationship, then tragedy strikes ...

These story beats come all too often in Maestro, which ultimately feels like it's much less about the maestro than we hope. Walking out of Maestro, to the rich hyperactivity of Bernstein's overture to Candide, it struck me that we have no idea what Bernstein went through to make Candide, or how it failed and he remained stuck to it for decades in an ongoing effort to revise it and make it work, until it finally became recognized as a great American creation. We hear only a brief mention and a snippet of music from West Side Story. We hear about his popular TV programs, watch him conduct a time or two, but Maestro never gets to the heart of how it was done, what it took of and from Bernstein, how his success and celebrity both defined and constrained him.

Worse, Maestro uses his complex, confounding sexuality as a plot point rather than something on which to build the entire film. For whatever reason, Maestro mostly skirts the issue of Bernstein's bisexuality, or his closeted homosexuality, or his dazzling pansexuality, or whatever the reality turned out to be.

It both is and is not the fault of Cooper. As a director, he is an ambitious, bold visionary; he is able to tell his story through visuals that most directors would never dream or dare. As a performer, he's both committed and impressive. It takes only a moment to believe that Cooper is Bernstein, and once you do the illusion never fades. But Cooper also co-wrote the screenplay, with Josh Singer, and it's here that Maestro stumbles. Characters come and go; others are introduced in theory but never in fact—there are more than a few faces who keep popping up but whose names and functions we don't understand. Because it can't decide whether it's the story of a creative visionary or the story of a marriage, Maestro can't quite define itself.

And yet, it's a film well worth seeing, even though it's barely being released in theaters and its most important visual component—a shifting aspect ratio that reflects filmmaking techniques of the time in which the story is set—will be rendered meaningless on home screens. On that level, and almost every other, Maestro should be, but generally won't be, seen in a movie theater.

Ideally one with excellent sound. Maybe one day I'll get to see it that way, too.

Viewed November 25, 2023 — Egyptian Theater

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