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"Hi, I'm Lenny" begins the trailer of Maestro, following the work and life of renowned composer and conductor, Leonard Bernstein, and his family life with actress Felicia Montealegre. We follow their young life together, meeting, getting married, building a family, all while Bernstein's career is skyrocketing. It is a personal portrait that gives us the intimate details of Bernstein's life, his extramarital relationships that were open and accepted by his wife, and his unrelenting passion for music and conducting.
The direction of this film is utterly magnificent. At the conclusion of the movie, my first thought was "there's Cooper's first Oscar." It is Bradley Cooper's magnum opus, and the acting is the absolute least of his achievements in Maestro. There was some criticism of the makeup used on Cooper's nose, but if you look at the picture of him versus Bernstein, we see that the nose was actually under-constructed, rather than overdone. (Plus the ears!)
Ironically, Bernstein never won an Oscar and was only nominated once (for On the Waterfront), despite his work on West Side Story. The serendipity of that work and Steven Spielberg's involvement with this movie (having revived West Side Story as a film) is a lovely continuation of Spielberg's obsession with that movie.
Now, I'm no aficionado of orchestra conducting, so I have no idea if Cooper pulls it off or not, with the second year in a row featuring films that spotlight conductors (last year, Cate Blanchet's performance in Tar was the first), but I can tell you that it looked terribly authentic, and whether or not it was, Bradley Cooper certainly sold it well. He put the passion for the whole life story into those 6 minutes of conducting, and you can feel it ooze from his every pore, his every fiber. He worked for 6 years on that skill, and again, I have no idea if he did it right. But nonetheless, he did it convincingly, and that was more than enough for me.
If you liked Maestro, why not try this book:
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