BRADLEY Cooper, who directs and stars as Leonard Bernstein in the new Netflix film Maestro, has revealed that he spent six years learning to conduct in preparation for his role as the world-renowned American composer.
And while Maestro is bold and intimate, it isn’t without its flaws, often feeling disjointed and reticent to share the true story, to really dig deep, get down and dirty, in sharing the real nature of Bernstein as a complex and flawed human being.
The film never lets us get too close and continuously shifts tempo, more a collage of frustrating vignettes than a warts-and-all biopic that reveals the genuine nature of the famed conductor.
At its centre is a love story that chronicles the relationship with his long-suffering wife Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein played with great poise by the always brilliant Carey Mulligan. Billed as a love letter to life and art, Maestro, according to the flattering press endorsements at least, is an emotionally epic portrayal of family and love.
Unfortunately, it is anything but.
Cold and calculated for the best part, Cooper has instead made a heavy-handed film straight from the ‘How to Win Academy Awards’ handbook, that is more Oscar season fluff than a masterful and thundering biography worthy of the West Side Story composer.
It is emotionally bereft.
There’s a great film buried beneath the exaggerated prosthetics and skittish editing, but alas, it is lost for the best part in self-indulgent and clichéd Hollywood duplicity.
The only time the Cooper really gives us a glimpse of the artist’s soul is towards the end in a scene that he spent six years preparing for. If anything, this is the real crescendo of an otherwise lacklustre affair.
In a scene where Cooper recreates the iconic 1976 performance of Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony No 2 in the Cambridgeshire cathedral, we get caught up in his sweat-drenched and euphoric performance, a performance where all Bernstein’s human frailties and flaws fall away to display a beautiful phoenix rising to the heavens. Here’s a man you could forgive anything, it seems to suggest.
Under the A Star is Born actor’s baton for this powerful scene are the London Symphony Orchestra, a 100-strong chorus, and two soloists, in a moment that lifts the previous two hours up out of the mire with glorious panache.
(3/5)
