REVIEW: Maestro [2023]

Rating: R | Runtime: 129 minutes
Release Date: November 22nd, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Netflix
Director(s): Bradley Cooper
Writer(s): Bradley Cooper & Josh Singer

I want a lot of things.

If you’re hoping to learn about who Leonard Bernstein was—pick up a biography. Bradley Cooper’s Maestro won’t give you what you need. If you’re conversely hoping to see the messy, adoring, frustrating, and devoted love story between two people who just happen to be Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre, however, you’ve come to the right place. Because although Cooper and Josh Singer’s script spans decades of history, it doesn’t really say much. It chooses to feel instead.

Think of the film as a series of intimately candid snapshots of a tumultuous romance that every so often skirts with public celebrity. There’s a television interview and a post-concert moment shaking hands with the audience, but Maestro is otherwise a behind-closed-doors account of what it was like for Lenny (Cooper) and Felicia (Carey Mulligan) to love each other so much that the chaotic nature of their careers and his extracurriculars never quite bent far enough to break.

The first half is a directing clinic for Cooper with inventive visual segues and sweeping camera shots capturing the whirlwind affair that pulled a young and just-made-famous Bernstein from his first love (Matt Bomer’s David Oppenheim). The second half is an acting clinic with two performers at the top of their game via unspoken tensions, unbridled resentment, and abject fear. With wonderful cinematography and Bernstein’s own music scoring the whole, Cooper has really gone full-bore into aesthetics over plot.

I honestly wish he pushed things even further. Make it a complete tone poem with his glimpses of emotional outburst. Throw away every semblance of narrative to force us to give ourselves over to the moment. Too often I desperately wanted to do so only to find myself bogged down by the literal connections of cause and effect that make the finished product feel more like an abridged edit of a much longer piece that leaves context on the floor rather than a carefully composed journey through extremely poignant and challenging vignettes.

It’s still an enthralling work, though. Mulligan and Cooper are too good for it not to be and the latter shows A Star Is Born wasn’t a fluke on the directing side. You can therefore forgive most shortcomings of the script because its presence is less a road map than a catalyst. It’s about the fireworks. The ego (kudos to Cooper for fitting in a little Billy Joel). The sadness. And the inexplicably unyielding love that always overcomes. Maybe it is all style and little substance, but its dual portrait (albeit shallow) is no less invigorating as a result.