I’ve always been a little bit irked by Bradley Cooper. It probably has to do with the fact that he burst onto the scene playing a slew of unlikable characters, or maybe the clips of him as a student at the Actors Studio, flashing that same Sack Lodge smile while asking Robert De Niro about the way he rubbed his eye in Awakenings. But really, I think it has to do with A Star Is Born.
Cooper is convincing as the troubled country rocker Jack Maine. But that authenticity was mostly ruined by the film’s promotional strategy, which revolved around the fact that Cooper spent a year learning to sing for the role. It’s hard now to listen to Cooper duet with Lady Gaga on otherwise fine songs such as “Shallow” without thinking about how much time he spent with a vocal coach.
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That is, of course, Cooper’s endgame. He wants you to know that he’s an artist, thank you very much, and that despite what you may have thought about The Hangover Part III, he’s actually a sophisticated cinephile who can also direct and sing and could learn to speak Finnish if the role called for it. It doesn’t matter if you enjoy his films, so long as you appreciate how much he prepared for them.
That is the main, but certainly not the only, reason Maestro is so tiresome. The film, which stars Cooper as the composer Leonard Bernstein, hit Netflix after a limited theatrical release and months of critical acclaim. But Maestro, which Cooper also wrote, directed, and produced, is a disjointed mess that has little to say about Bernstein’s life or work. In Cooper’s hands, one of the 20th century’s great artists is reduced to a garish spectacle, the sole purpose of which is to remind everyone just how good Bradley Cooper is.
Maestro follows Bernstein and his long-suffering wife, Felicia (Carey Mulligan), from the auspicious beginning of the former’s career through the latter’s death from lung cancer in 1978. The film frequently skips forward in time, leapfrogging major events in the composer’s career to trace the slow dissolution of his marriage. These disorienting jumps are further accentuated by Cooper’s decision to break the film into three distinct acts, each with its own tone and style.
The first act, which is inexplicably shot in black and white, shows the Bernsteins’ courtship and Leonard’s rise through a series of half-hearted dance numbers and cheeky fourth wall demolitions. The second and strongest act of the film shows Felicia reaching her breaking point with Leonard’s substance abuse and extramarital affairs with men, things she initially countenanced but grew to regret. The final act shows Felicia losing her battle with cancer in excruciating detail, so much so that I began questioning Cooper’s mental state, to say nothing of his artistic sensibility.
At nearly every moment, Cooper makes bizarre directorial choices. While the first act is annoyingly schmaltzy, it nonetheless breezes past the timeless music Bernstein wrote in the period, as well as the entertaining characters in his orbit. The incredibly talented actors in Maestro’s supporting cast, which includes Matt Bomer and Succession’s Jeremy Strong, are given frustratingly little screen time, popping in briefly to deliver a forgettable line before disappearing once more.
The speed with which this biopic discards its subject’s biography brings us to the film’s biggest problem, namely that Leonard and Felicia Bernstein are not familiar enough figures to support such an intimate portrayal. Netflix may have distributed the movie, but Google would have been a better choice, considering how often viewers will be reaching for their phones to fill in Maestro’s countless historical gaps.
Having dispatched with biography, context, and anything other than indulgent psychodrama, Cooper renders a portrait of Bernstein at his worst: drunk, grappling with his sexuality, and feuding with the people he loves. Still, the film has nothing interesting to say about these unpleasant subjects, nor how they should color our appreciation of Bernstein’s art, if at all.
And what of that art? Bernstein’s music, including selections from West Side Story and On the Town, serve as Maestro’s score. But we hardly see Bernstein speak of his compositions and only see him compose the final notes of Mass. The film’s best scene is a beat-for-beat recreation of Bernstein’s famous performance of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony at England’s Ely Cathedral. It’s an exhilarating moment, and Cooper deserves credit for his ability to mimic Bernstein’s performance behind the podium expertly.
But this is like praising Rami Malek for capping his teeth and lip-syncing to Freddie Mercury’s vocals in Bohemian Rhapsody. The performance is as prosthetic as Cooper’s much-ballyhooed fake nose: It’s not acting so much as it’s imitation. Maestro’s real subject is not Bernstein but Cooper himself. The point is not to celebrate or interrogate the conductor but to show what Bradley Cooper learned in the six years he spent studying conducting.
Cooper doesn’t care about Bernstein’s music, or else he wouldn’t have ended his movie with the second movement of the “Chichester Psalms” playing over footage of Bernstein conducting the “Overture” to Candide, two pieces that could not be any more different. Cooper’s aim, as ever, was not to educate, edify, or entertain but rather to rub in the audience’s face just how good he is at this.
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It’s an odd combination of arrogance and insecurity. It’s also the subject of Maestro’s best scene, a marital spat that Cooper has called “the scene of the film,” the moment to which “the whole film builds.”
“You have hate in your heart,” Felicia spits at her husband. “That’s what drives you. … You aren’t up on that podium, allowing us to experience the music the way it is intended. You are throwing it in our faces.” She might as well have been talking about Maestro.
Tim Rice is associate editor of the Washington Free Beacon.
