MAESTRO (NETFLIX) (2023)

SYNOPSIS: From Director Bradley Cooper, Maestro is the towering and fearless love story chronicling the lifelong relationship between cultural icon Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein. A love letter to life and art, Maestro, at its core, is an emotionally epic portrayal of family and love.

MOVIE REVIEW:

After Maestro, sceptics will be assured that actor turned director Bradley Cooper is no one trick pony. With the support from famed filmmakers Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, Cooper turned in a solid story based on the life of composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein.

Instead of going down the road of a conventional biopic, Maestro is mostly a love story between Bernstein and his wife, Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). You can even say it’s a marriage story despite Bernstein’s staggering amount of acclaimed musical works. The focus in Cooper’s story however is not on his career path or music but the struggles of a very talented homosexual man.

The story spanned decades. You can tell from the story moving from black and white to colour and the flawless make up design on the main characters. We first see Leonard getting the chance to conduct for the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall after the guest conductor came down with the flu. At that time, he is also having a romantic affair with clarinettist David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer). Shortly, he is mesmerised by aspiring Broadway actress Felicia and they went on to get married and Felicia bore Bernstein three children. His career is also booming having composing successful operas and musicals. But Bernstein’s constant openly affairs with men starts to take a toll on Felicia’s mental health and subsequently, they starts to drift apart after a heated argument.

If the name Leonard Bernstein is a blank to you, I’m afraid Maestro doesn’t do much to elevate things on the whole. There’s snippets of his famous works (West Side Story for example) being heard but that’s about it. Even his affairs with men liked Oppenheim, Tommy Cothran and numerous others comes across as fleeting and inconsequential. In fact, it’s Mulligan’s Felicia Montealegre that gets all the screentime as the suffering wife and muse of Leonard Bernstein. Montealegre relationship with her husband is complicated, far more complex than the musical scores he wrote and conducted. No doubt the man is bisexual or even a homosexual trying to hide his true self from the public eyes but Montealegre remains his only true love in the end after a poetic, touching TV interview he gave.

Apparently Cooper spent six years trying to get the biopic to the screen and the man certainly puts in a rousing performance as the charismatic, larger than life conductor. Comparing Cooper’s presence to archive footages of Bernstein, the mannerisms and sexual appeal are flawlessly nailed by Cooper (the notorious prosthetic nose indeed plays a part as well). English actress Mulligan is absolutely stunning as the suffering wife and the woman behind Bernstein, likely deserving a nomination comes award season.

While Maestro is definitely not a soaring account of Bernstein’s music career, it’s definitely an inspiring, passionate love movie about two complicated souls that love and hated each other, struggled with their respective demons throughout their 27 years of marriage. It’s genuinely more of a love story than a straight-forward biopic.

MOVIE RATING:

Review by Linus Tee