MAESTRO (Third Place in Entertainment Review, MCMA 2024)

Five years after his debut hit “A Star is Born,” director and actor Bradley Cooper has released another music-related film, “Maestro.”

It should make for an extremely powerful and personal love story, and yet, despite being well-acted and well-made, “Maestro” ends up being just, well, okay. 

In the music biopic about the iconic composer, and the fictional Lydia Tár’s “mentor,” Cooper deviates from other biopics like “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Ray,” which were so cliche that they made the genre parodied to death. 

Instead, “Maestro” focuses less on a childhood-to-death story of Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) and more on his relationship with actor Felicity Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), covering two periods of their lives and lifelong marriage. It even touches on Bernstein’s bisexuality and how that affects his wife and family. 

The film makes sure to have an artistic edge, showing the early days of their career in black-and-white and the later part of their lives in color, all shot in a square 4×3 aspect ratio.

The filmmaking, while ambitious and sometimes visually striking, is strangely at odds with itself. Some moments have a grand, bombastic tone, where the camerawork includes these grand sweeping dolly and crane shots, like a musical number or a transition of a young Lenny running from his apartment to Carnegie Hall for his first gig. The problem is that these energetic and showy scenes are contained inside a small aspect ratio, never capturing the epic bravura they are obviously trying to express.

Other times the soundtrack does this, too. With all the music being works from Bernstein, some of the music is big and loud while others are melancholic and subtle. This leads to scenes working well with the music and others feeling unnecessary and a bit too much. 

Did the opening ballet from “West Side Story” really need to play over Felicity suspecting that her husband is having an affair when the cinematography and acting already shows that?

Then there’s the elephant in the room, the reason why “Maestro” has been getting press: the nose. For the most part, Kazu Miro’s makeup on Bernstein and Montealegre is incredibly realistic, especially for when they’re older. The wrinkled skin and graying hair look authentic. But when the film covers the composer in his twenties, who is still played by an actor in his late 40s, the result is not pretty. 

Because he has to be younger, the rubber-faced Cooper looks distracting and unnerving. Any time the film cuts to an extreme close-up of Cooper facing the camera, his prosthetic cheekbones, pointy chin and large nose fill up the screen—it is terrifying. Yes, the nose can be distracting, but it works better on an older Bernstein.

It is instead the casting that feels offensive. The main issue is the decision to cast a non-Jewish actor to play a real-life Jewish man and Carey Mulligan, a white, British woman, to play the Costa-rican Montealegre. And because of the inaccurate casting, the film’s pursuit for authenticity is sidetracked, instead becoming another star-studded vehicle made to win awards. Either that or a reference done in bad taste to the casting of “West Side Story.”

Read the rest of the article at the Webster Journal - https://websterjournal.com/2023/12/15/maestro-composes-a-superficial-love-story/