Bradley Cooper Is Leonard Bernstein — And I Am Marie of Romania

For decades during the postwar era, Leonard Bernstein occupied a unique place at the red-hot center of both America’s high and middlebrow culture. While serving as music director of the New York Philharmonic, he conducted major orchestras around the world...

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For decades during the postwar era, Leonard Bernstein occupied a unique place at the red-hot center of both America’s high and middlebrow culture. While serving as music director of the New York Philharmonic, he conducted major orchestras around the world and composed a number of major classical works, including Mass, which he wrote, on the invitation of Jacqueline Kennedy, for the opening of the Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts. In his heyday, no orchestra conductor on earth was anywhere near as famous. At the same time, his musicals — most famously, West Side Story, the movie version of which won the Oscar for Best Picture — made him the best-known Broadway songwriter of the day. Even as a schoolboy, I was aware of him: every Saturday for years, CBS-TV aired his “Young People’s Concerts,” on which he introduced children to classical music and explained such things as melody, mode, and orchestration.

It was a different time — and a colorful career, one that offers an embarrassment of riches to anyone who might want to make a movie about it. As it happens, that’s something that Martin Scorsese wanted to do a few years ago, and Steven Spielberg wanted to do some time later. Those plans didn’t work out, alas, and now both Scorsese and Spielberg are listed as producers on the new Netflix offering, Maestro, that Bradley Cooper has directed from a script he wrote with Josh Singer and that stars Cooper himself as Bernstein. (READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: The Crown’s Surprisingly Touching Finale)

It’s a beautiful-looking film — thanks to cinematographer Matthew Libatique — but if you’re looking for a jam-packed account of a jam-packed life, look elsewhere. Yes, it starts out promisingly enough. After a brief opening scene that shows Bernstein at 70 (he died in 1990 at 72), we jump back to November 14, 1943, and switch from color to black-and-white. Bernstein, 25, is in bed with his current main squeeze, clarinetist David Oppenheim, when he’s awakened by the phone call that changed his life: the New York Philharmonic’s guest conductor, Bruno Walter, is ill, and Bernstein, a total unknown, must take his place on the podium tonight. The performance — executed without a moment’s rehearsal — is a triumph, and makes Bernstein famous, at least among the glitterati.

Soon he and choreographer Jerry Robbins (Michael Urie) are collaborating on a ballet, Fancy Free. At a showbiz party (whose oddball guests bring to mind Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories), Bernstein’s sister, Shirley (Sarah Silverman), introduces him to the vivacious Latin American actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). They proceed, in an intense tête-à-tête, to exchange tons of exposition. Explaining that he can be “many things at once,” Lenny says that he senses she’s the same way. Meanwhile we start to get a sense of him: already accustomed to being the center of attention in any room he’s in, Lenny lives fast, loves fast, works fast, and talks so fast that he doesn’t just talk over other people but somehow manages even to talk over himself.

Anyway, they start courting. On the stage of an empty theater where she’s been rehearsing a play, he reads aloud with her from the script. They kiss. But mostly they talk. And talk and talk. She says she doesn’t fear anything. He insists his success was the result of luck. Later they sit in a field of grass and talk some more. Also, they laugh a lot. There’s a lot of laughter in this movie, even though nothing in it is remotely funny.

He takes her to lunch with veteran conductor Serge Koussevitzky (Yasen Peyankov), who says Lenny “can be the first great American conductor” if only he drops the pop music and changes his name to Burns. Felicia disagrees: at a rehearsal of a dance number from his first Broadway show, On the Town (“It’s not serious music, is it?” Bernstein grumbles), Felicia asks why he’d want to give up all this fun to be “the first great American conductor”: “Is that what you want?” “I want a lot of things,” he replies, and he’s not just talking about his career. There follows an odd, clunky dream dance, à la Agnes de Mille, dramatizing Lenny’s sexual and career conflicts — as well as Felicia’s own awareness that she might be better off hooking up with actor Dick Hart (Tim Rogan), whom Shirley has pushed on her, than with Lenny.

But no, she picks Lenny. In bed, in a painfully arty scene that feels like a detour into the French New Wave, he tells her what he used to dream about in childhood, which is as interesting as — well — hearing somebody tell you what he used to dream about in childhood. So it goes between them for most of the rest of the movie: long scenes, consisting of plenty of aimless dialogue (“I love your smell”), bursts of inexplicable laughter, many long silences, and intense, meaningful close-ups. Oh, plus loads of cigarettes and cocktails. (Felicia ended up dying of lung cancer, while Lenny developed emphysema.) At times Maestro recalls Woody Allen at his most serious (like many of Allen’s movies, it’s a tribute, in part, to upscale Manhattan life). On other occasions one reflects that, if Ingmar Bergman hadn’t already used the title, this picture could’ve been called Scenes From a Marriage. (READ MORE: Imperfect Criticism, Great TV: Remembering Siskel & Ebert)

In any event, they do indeed marry, Felicia having made it clear she’s aware of his gay dalliances (“I know exactly who you are”) and is OK with them. Time passes. They do a joint TV interview with Ed Murrow, which serves to update us on Lenny’s career — for example, Felicia tells Murrow that Lenny’s working on West Side Story with a “brilliant” young lyricist named Stephen Sondheim. But why don’t we see any of that collaboration? Sondheim isn’t even a character here. Why not? More time passes, and the film switches from black-and-white back to color. Lenny and Felicia, who now have three kids, throw a party at their Dakota digs — filmed, Woody Allen style, with few cuts and a roving camera. When young Tommy Cothran (Gideon Glick) catches his eye, Lenny burbles out silly compliments — “Your hair is just glorious!” — then takes him out of the apartment, where Felicia catches them by the elevator in mid-kiss. “Fix your hair,” she orders Lenny coolly. “You’re getting sloppy.” His gay life, now apparently less discreet than before, is plainly no longer as light a burden to her as it was at the start.

Later, at the Bernsteins’ Connecticut country house, John Gruen (Josh Hamilton), who’s interviewing Lenny, kicks off the conversation with yet another update on Lenny’s career: “Fifteen years on television … ten years at the New York Philharmonic…. West Side Story redefined the American musical.” Rarely has any film shoveled in so much exposition so often. Again, why not show us at least some of this good stuff? Because for some reason Cooper prefers to focus on lugubrious scenes like this one with Gruen, in which Lenny dismisses his own accomplishments (even though his tone is one of monumental self-importance): “It’s a great source of dissatisfaction that I don’t feel I’ve created that much at all…. As we sit here, I find it very difficult to think that whether I am a conductor or composer of any note has any bearing on anything.” Gruen professes to understand: “This has marked many artists, and you can see it in their work.” Bernstein moves on to the topic of Felicia. “It’s almost as if she can’t enjoy anything anymore,” he says. “I think she has a keen sense of futility.” “I sense that too about her,” replies Gruen, who notes that the once “vivacious” Felicia now “seems crushed.” In almost every serious Woody Allen movie, there’s a line or two of dialogue that’s so pretentious and unnatural that it makes you cringe. In this movie, there are whole scenes like that.

So it goes. In yet another tiresome, phony-sounding heart-to-heart, Felicia accuses Lenny of “failing to fulfill his obligations to his talent” and says that it’s “draining to love someone who doesn’t love and accept himself.” Cut to the cathedral in Ely, England, where Bernstein conducts the last several minutes of Mahler’s Second: he’s supposed to look impassioned, possessed by the beauty of the music and by his ardor for his art, but instead he comes off as frighteningly manic, edging into laughably cartoonish. After the concern, he and Felicia find reconciliation. But their good fortune, alas, is about to dry up. Felicia starts dying of cancer, and Lenny embraces her in bed. We should feel for them. But we don’t. We’ve spent more than two hours with them, but now we find ourselves asking: who are these people? When, after her death, Lenny goes into a group hug with their grown kids, we realize we haven’t a clue who these kids are: they’re just actors playing the Bernsteins’ offspring.

In fact, as the movie wears on, instead of feeling increasingly that we know Lenny inside and out, we’re more and more aware that we’re watching a performance by an actor who’s put on a nasal voice, a stage nose, an unusually self-important manner, and an at least occasionally antic disposition, in order to blow us away with his talent for mimicry. Yet Cooper’s depiction of Bernstein — when viewed alongside YouTube videos of the real thing — is exceedingly stylized and absurdly exaggerated. Watching the actual Bernstein on YouTube is, frankly, a lot more interesting, especially over the long haul, than watching Cooper pretending to be him. Indeed, a single episode of Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts, in which he strives so earnestly to instill in American children his own love of music, is more moving than the whole of Cooper’s film put together. (READ MORE: A Spirited Treatise on Classical Music)

What went wrong here? Cooper seems to have decided to eschew conventional plotting and character development as somehow beneath him artistically, preferring instead to limn — in a distanced and sophisticated way, drawing on various sophisticated cinematic antecedents — the story of a sophisticated mid-century marriage between two eminently sophisticated artistes. But Cooper seems to have considered it suitable to observe these eminences from a discreet distance rather than to be so unseemly as to dig too far beneath their surfaces.

Discretion, indeed, is the mot juste here: that brief shot of Bernstein in bed with his boyfriend on the morning of November 14, 1943, is by far the film’s most risqué moment; for all the allusions to his extramarital indiscretions, all that we see of those indiscretions is that fleeting kiss by the elevator with Tommy. This is a movie with multiple party scenes, but it pointedly omits the most famous party of Bernstein’s life — indeed, perhaps the most famous party of the 1970s. I’m referring, of course, to the 1970 fundraising bash that Lenny and Felicia threw for the Black Panthers and that was immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s brilliant essay “Radical Chic.” That disgraceful event — which captured for all time the inane eagerness of certain elements of the haute monde to cozy up to savages whose only goal was to destroy them and their ilk —was only one of several occasions on which Bernstein, this purported sophisticate and authentic musical genius, displayed staggering political naïveté. For example, after conducting the New York Philharmonic in Moscow in 1959, he remarked that this could be “a thrilling world … if only we knew we would never again have to indulge the brutal sin of war-making. If the Russians could be as hospitable and warm as they were to us, why couldn’t such warmth overflow into the totality of our relations?”

Including such episodes in Maestro would’ve enriched it immensely. So would a scene or two showing Bernstein at work with Sondheim on West Side Story. But Cooper made other choices, so that what we come away from this film with is the knowledge that Bernstein was a bon vivant and closet case and Felicia a glamorous and loving but often unhappy wife — in short, yet another couple with lots of money and lots of problems. What’s missing? Only the abundance of rich specifics that make up a life. What a lost opportunity this was to make a captivating — and inspiring — movie about a uniquely colorful and complex man.

The post Bradley Cooper Is Leonard Bernstein — And I Am Marie of Romania appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.