Maestro

[On Pointe]

Bradley Cooper's Maestro is a portrait of the complicated marriage of Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre.  It's playing now in theaters and on Netflix and I highly recommend it as a character study and for its great acting performances from Cooper as Bernstein and Carey Mulligan as Felicia.  But anyone looking for a deep dive into Bernstein's creative process will be disappointed.  

There is an excerpt from Fancy Free,  staged by Justin Peck,  assisted by Craig Salstein,  and danced by NYCB's Sebastian Villarini-Velez,  Harrison Coll,  and freelance dancers,  including Jeannette Delgado.  The ballet materializes in an empty theater,  then expands to a fantasy that includes Lenny and Felicia in the ensemble.  That's the only dance in the film.  Bernstein's great success West Side Story is barely mentioned.  But I did enjoy Michael Urie as Jerome Robbins,  or "Jerry" as they call him.  He only has a couple of lines,  but Urie brilliantly conveys Robbins' prickly personality and kinetic energy.

I had to dig through the IMdB listing to find Peck's credit.  Choreographers used to get more respect in Hollywood.  I beieve Balanchine introduced the term when he worked in the movies.  Before him they were called dance directors.

 

[Mashinka]

I saw this film with a couple of friends and we loved it.  It is very much about his private life, but there is a great deal of his music all the way through.  Bernstein did a lot of work for BBC TV, not just conducting but interviews and lectures too.  I must have seen some way back in the 60's but so great was Bernstein's personality and enthusiasm that I still remember them vividly.  Superb acting, I hope some sort of award might be in the offing.

[California]

1 hour ago, On Pointe said:

There is an excerpt from Fancy Free,  staged by Justin Peck,  assisted by Craig Salstein,  and danced by NYCB's Sebastian Villarini-Velez,  Harrison Coll,  and freelance dancers,  including Jeannette Delgado.  The ballet materializes in an empty theater,  then expands to a fantasy that includes Lenny and Felicia in the ensemble.  That's the only dance in the film.  Bernstein's great success West Side Story is barely mentioned.  But I did enjoy Michael Urie as Jerome Robbins,  or "Jerry" as they call him.  He only has a couple of lines,  but Urie brilliantly conveys Robbins' prickly personality and kinetic energy.

I had to dig through the IMdB listing to find Peck's credit.  Choreographers used to get more respect in Hollywood.  I beieve Balanchine introduced the term when he worked in the movies.  Before him they were called dance directors.

 

I watched Maestro on Netflix and found it interesting. I turned on captioning so all the musical snippets throughout were identified. (Were those visible in the theater?) The Fancy Free excerpts are great fun and the lengthy Mahler performance near the end was quite extraordinary. I was disappointed that West Side Story didn't get much attention. 

I slogged through the credits at the end to find Peck's listing as the choreographer. The credits run over a complete performance of Overture to Candide, one of my all-time Bernstein favorites, so it ends on a high note. But I didn't feel much incentive to watch this one again.

[Quiggin]

It looks intriguing and seductive from the clips, but I'm also put off by the marker of artistic success being a work's verisimilitude, impersonation here being so upfront and so much the focus that you're always saying, "that's so just like Lenny."

Zachary Woolfe has a piece in today's Times about what's been left out of the movie, Bernstein's actually life as a gay man (I remember Lillian Hellman fussily chastising him on Dick Cavett one night for this) and his and Felicia's involvement in social issues. But also left out, more importantly, are LB struggles to be accepted as a composer, rather than a conductor or writer of musicals, judgments that dogged him all his life. Important biographical points get deleted or rounded off and Bernstein ends up in the public imagination as a kind of celebrity caricature, full of ticks and actors' tricks.

 

 

Edited December 23, 2023 by Quiggin

[Drew]

6 hours ago, Quiggin said:

It looks intriguing and seductive from the clips, but I'm also put off by the marker of artistic success being a work's verisimilitude, impersonation here being so upfront and so much the focus that you're always saying, "that's so just like Lenny."

Zachary Woolfe has a piece in today's Times about what's been left out of the movie, Bernstein's actually life as a gay man (I remember Lillian Hellman fussily chastising him on Dick Cavett one night for this) and his and Felicia's involvement in social issues. But also left out, more importantly, are LB struggles to be accepted as a composer, rather than a conductor or writer of musicals, judgments that dogged him all his life. Important biographical points get deleted or rounded off and Bernstein ends up in the public imagination as a kind of celebrity caricature, full of ticks and actors' tricks.

 

 

I watched it last night. I had a mixed reaction, but I think it helps to view the movie less as a Bernstein bio-pick than as a study of the Bernstein's marriage.  (Which is how @On Pointe described it above.) From that point of view, perhaps not everything that was left out needed to be there, and the title "Maestro" is arguably a bit misleading. For me the lack of attention to social/political issues (eg opposition to the Vietnam war, the party raising bail money for the  members of the Black Panthers, which was skewered by Tom Wolfe) is the big missing piece in a movie about that marriage, and I would like to have seen the movie's take on the "radical chic" charge.  Such attention would also have shown the marriage as an experiment in living beyond the experiment involved in the management of "Lenny" and "Felicia's" individual desires. It also might have filled out the picture of Felicia whom we otherwise seem meant to admire for putting up with the monstre sacré as much as for anything else. 

In fact, I'm a little embarrassed to say that I disliked the film's fictional Felicia--not helped by the over the top entrance the film gives her, much as if she were Audrey Hepburn stepping into a ballroom--and I even paused Netflix at one point to rant to Mr. Drew about her arrogance and dishonesty (those were my words). However, that does seem to be part of the intended portrait, and she gets a speech saying those things about herself late in the film. That helped me view her more sympathetically and I found the final sections of the film by some measure the most effective and most moving. I probably should watch it again to give the first part more of a chance, now I know where it goes, but....

Edited December 24, 2023 by Drew
Incorrect attribution; grammar

[abatt]

Bradley Cooper’s ‘Maestro’ Won’t Let Leonard Bernstein Fail - The New York Times (nytimes.com

Here is an interesting article written by the NY Times' music critic.  

I watched the movie last night and was disappointed.  The scenes of him conducting were so over-exaggerated they bordered on comical.  Best parts were seeing the scenes from Fancy Free and trying to identify the dancers.  Also enjoyed seeing sopranos Isabel Leonard and Rosa Feola.  Best Picture, Best Director?  I think not.

 

 

[On Pointe]

18 hours ago, Drew said:

In fact, I'm a little embarrassed to say that I disliked the film's fictional Felicia--not helped by the over the top entrance the film gives her, much as if she were Audrey Hepburn stepping into a ballroom--and I even paused Netflix at one point to rant to Mr. Drew about her arrogance and dishonesty (those were my words).

What did I miss - how was Felicia arrogant and dishonest?  She came across to me as a bit brittle,  with her sleek updos and mid-Atlantic accent.  But that was an accurate depiction of Felicia Montealegre and typical of wealthy white women in Manhattan at the time.  (I was around a lot of them in the 70s and 80s.). What was atypical was her devotion to left wing causes,  which wasn't touched upon in the film.  But there was no way that Bradley Cooper could include every aspect of the Bernsteins' life and marriage in a two hour film.  

I must have been under a rock because I don't recall anything about Bernstein coming out at that time.  I didn't know that he moved to LA with a male lover,  none of it.  I am perplexed by the heated discussion of whether he was gay or bisexual.  Apparently he cheated on Felicia with women as well as men,  and he had three children.  Seems like a bisexual to me.

[Drew]

6 hours ago, On Pointe said:

What did I miss - how was Felicia arrogant and dishonest?  She came across to me as a bit brittle,  with her sleek updos and mid-Atlantic accent.  But that was an accurate depiction of Felicia Montealegre and typical of wealthy white women in Manhattan at the time. 

 

Speaking of movie-Felicia--she was very explicit she didn't expect Bernstein to be anyone other than he was and she understood that this approach to their marriage would only work if it wasn't done as any kind of "sacrifice" on her part.  But the movie then shows her in what seemed to me various passive-aggressive moments that made crystal clear she was bothered by his choices, and even showed her oh-so-subtly playing the martyr .  This may be humanly understandable, but to me the character (as written) seemed  arrogant and dishonest (to herself if no-one else) for thinking she had the key to living with Lenny when very obviously she didn't. I felt somewhat vindicated--and more sympathetic towards the character-- when late in the film, during a lunch at the Plaza or some such, Felicia herself says these two things: that she had been "arrogant" for thinking she didn't need Lenny's attention the way everyone else around him did and then adds ruefully something like "so who is dishonest?"

I think one thing that kept me from responding more generously to the character in the early part of the film, is that I felt the movie was trying to hector me into falling in love with her (I mentioned her entrance in the earlier post). Anyway, it's just an odd quirk of how I responded. I did find the later parts of the movie pretty compelling and was happy we got a chunk of Mahler.

(Had it been more of a movie about Bernstein's career as "maestro" it would have been interesting to fit in something about how he helped to make Mahler a mainstay of concert halls--with  Mahler also another ambivalently Jewish figure. But that would be a different movie...)

Edited December 25, 2023 by Drew
realized I was repeating something I said earlier

[Marta]

I liked the movie very much, and I knew in advance that it focused on LB's marriage.  So I was not disappointed although more attention to his music would have been welcome.  I'm a little surprised at the negativity toward Felicia's character because I just didn't feel that way.  Frankly I have to admit I was glad there was nothing said about Wolfe, "radical chic" and the couple's support for the Black Panthers.   There are a lot of valid crits and comments here, but as someone pointed out, there's only so much you can cram into a two hour movie.

Edited December 25, 2023 by Marta
incorrect spelling

[Drew]

39 minutes ago, Marta said:

  I'm a little surprised at the negativity toward Felicia's character because I jut didn't feel that way. 

I think I'm an outlier...

Edited December 25, 2023 by Drew

[Quiggin]

As Drew says, the title "Maestro" is where the problem begins. The title is about a conductor, the movie is about a love affair.

Regarding Mahler and Maestros, I had forgotten the fact that Mahler had briefly been director of the New York Philharmonic. And after Mahler's death it was Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, quite different in conducting style, who championed his work. This despite years of dismissive, John Martin-like reviews from Olin Downes and Howard Taubman in the Times. Dimitri Mitropoulos, Leonard Bernstein's mentor – there's perhaps an "Anxiety" story there – premiered the Sixth in New York in the late 40s and conducted Mahler after that whenever he could. Leonard Bernstein was then interested in Strauss ("Don Quixote"), Stravinsky and Shostakovitch, which do seem like influences for "Candide."

It was only after the series of nine commemorative Mahler concerts in 1959, with Mitropoulos, Bernstein, and Walter taking turns, that Bernstein seemed to get religion. (My own favorite New York Philharmonic Mahler conductor was Klaus Tennstedt who was able to tone down the orchestra's rambunctiousness, especially in transitions to the slow movements.)

Regarding Bernstein's sexuality, he does seem to have been genuinely gay, not bisexual and truly devoted to his family (Felicia Montealegre letter: “you are a homosexual and may never change [. . .] I am willing to accept you as you are, without being a martyr or sacrificing myself on the L.B. altar"). Maybe he was an actor who was not always convinced of his own acting.

 

Edited December 25, 2023 by Quiggin

[vipa]

I saw the movie today. So many good points have been already been made. I'll just add a few thoughts. I enjoyed it and think it's worth seeing, but ultimately found it a bit unsatisfying.  As others have said, it is  film about Bernstein's relationship with his wife  Felicia. A relationship made complex because he was gay and she always knew it. The flaw in the film, for me, was that there was no deep dive into Bernstein as a person, other than his sexual orientation. Felicia was the a way more complex character, and Carey Mulligan gave a wonderful performance. The movie ended rather abruptly, which I guess makes sense, since it was about their marriage. Once Felicia was no longer there, there wasn't much to do but show Bernstein working, flirting with men and partying. Still, all and all, an intriguing movie.

[dirac]

Quote

Dimitri Mitropoulos, Leonard Bernstein's mentor – there's perhaps an "Anxiety" story there – premiered the Sixth in New York in the late 40s and conducted Mahler after that whenever he could.

He goes unmentioned in Maestro, which took me aback. I realize Bernstein had a lot of father figures, but still.

[Jayne]

Saw this over New Years, and while I enjoyed the “Fancy Free” excerpts, it felt awkward when the early parts of the movie had so much blending of the magical and reality, but abruptly switched to a straight forward biopic about the marriage.  

I finished the film really loving Felicia and mourning her early death.  In their own way, they were devoted to one another.   But IMHO Bernstein would have been a better  as an episodic show like The Crown that explored Bernstein’s life and music decade by decade.

If I could turn back the clock, I would have green-lit that long-form show instead some of the woe-is-me-the-millionaire-celeb/blue blood/athlete that NF has been rolling out. 

 

 

[dirac]

I agree, Jayne, Bernstein lived too large to fit it all into two hours. A multi-season series might be a bit much for general appeal, but a limited series might be just the thing.

 

[Quiggin]

Mark Swed in the LA Times has some good notes on the movie, the first echoing abatt's reservations about the depiction of Bernstein's conducting style:

Quote

Copying Bernstein’s conducting is even more problematic. Cooper impressively mimics Bernstein’s movements in a performance of the apotheosis of Mahler’s Second Symphony at the Ely Cathedral in London, which Bernstein filmed. But you can’t mimic essence. “Don’t copy me,” Bernstein regularly told student conductors.

Worse, though, is the soundtrack, bits and pieces of Bernstein’s music mainly with Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. The recorded sound is bombastic; instrumental balances, grotesque; the conducting, bland. Had “Maestro” explored Bernstein as musician and shaman more thoroughly, it would have had to show that this soundtrack, which needs to be the heart of the film, goes against everything Bernstein stood for.

And on the significance of Thomas Cothran in Bernstein's life:

Quote

Bisexual, Bernstein began an affair in 1971 with a dazzlingly brilliant young man from Pasadena, Thomas Cothran, which, when discovered by Felicia, led to a breakup of the Bernsteins’ marriage. Tom happened to be a classmate of mine at Pasadena High School and we became good friends. He’s Tommy in “Maestro” (he never would have put up with that from anyone other than Bernstein) and dismissed in the film as little more than a casual attraction.

Tom and Lenny lived together for a predictably incompatible year. Tom had little patience for Lenny’s late-night bouts of insecurity and, by his telling, was able to trim some of the excesses from Bernstein’s 1973 Norton Lectures, “The Unanswered Question,” at Harvard University.

Here's Swed's whole Los Angeles Times piece about the "missing essence" of the Netflix pic:

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2023-12-22/netflix-maestro-movie-leonard-bernstein

And his link to a longer account of the Bernstein/Cothran relationship by Peter Napolitano in the Huffington Post:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/leonard-bernstein-maestro-tommy-cothran_n_65776e50e4b09724b4352994

Yes, a multi-season series might be the thing, but with all the material available, musical and biographical, it could well be an unlimited one. A whole season could be devoted to the making of Candide, with Lilian Hellman, Richard Wilbur, Barbara Cook, Voltaire, etc !

 

Edited January 29 by Quiggin

[Petra]

Watched it this morning on a sick day. I was expecting a 'hate-watch' and was taken by surprise at how much I enjoyed it. 

Wonderful to see a Hollywood movie that focuses on the importance of art and education. 

It's a messy movie, jumping around in time and location, focusing on certain things for a scene or two and then ignoring them but that suited the subject who tried to do everything and be everything (composer, conductor, teacher, etc.) as much as possible.  The movie makes an effort to present Bernstein "warts and all", but it's hard to believe that Lenny was as introspective and as self-aware as he is in the early scenes with Felicia, and he ends up being almost a stereotypical Great Man. For instance it's clear that Lenny had affairs during his marriage because he could, not because he was gay.

Kudos to Bradley Cooper for making a movie that is so thoughtful and raises questions as to what it means to be a Jew and Jewish. Timely in ways no one could imagine when the movie was being made.

And lastly, none of my children were 'dream babies', but perhaps if I'd had live-in help, they would have been...

[dirac]

On 12/24/2023 at 2:09 PM, On Pointe said:

What did I miss - how was Felicia arrogant and dishonest?  She came across to me as a bit brittle,  with her sleek updos and mid-Atlantic accent.  But that was an accurate depiction of Felicia Montealegre and typical of wealthy white women in Manhattan at the time.  (I was around a lot of them in the 70s and 80s.). What was atypical was her devotion to left wing causes,  which wasn't touched upon in the film.  But there was no way that Bradley Cooper could include every aspect of the Bernsteins' life and marriage in a two hour film.  

I must have been under a rock because I don't recall anything about Bernstein coming out at that time.  I didn't know that he moved to LA with a male lover,  none of it.  I am perplexed by the heated discussion of whether he was gay or bisexual.  Apparently he cheated on Felicia with women as well as men,  and he had three children.  Seems like a bisexual to me.

You weren't under a rock. Bernstein didn't come out publicly, although he lived and traveled with Cothran in a way that did cause some scandal within the profession, not to mention some distress for his daughter when Bernstein held court and partied with Cothran at Harvard for a year while she was an undergraduate (not so much because of Cothran as the way in which Bernstein was barging through his daughter's territory as she was trying to establish some independence).

Thank you for those links, Quiggin. I agree that Cothran was shortchanged in the movie, although to tell the whole story would have meant another hour, I'd say. The Napolitano article suggests that Bernstein went back to Felicia to care for her, but I have read that Bernstein and Cothran had broken up and Bernstein was back with Felicia before, but apparently very soon after, the diagnosis. (I don't remember how Maestro handles the timing.) Although i also think he was basically gay he missed his life as a pere de famille and he missed his wife. Of course today things would likely have worked out very differently.

[dirac]

On 12/24/2023 at 6:44 AM, abatt said:

Bradley Cooper’s ‘Maestro’ Won’t Let Leonard Bernstein Fail - The New York Times (nytimes.com

Here is an interesting article written by the NY Times' music critic.  

I watched the movie last night and was disappointed.  The scenes of him conducting were so over-exaggerated they bordered on comical.  Best parts were seeing the scenes from Fancy Free and trying to identify the dancers.  Also enjoyed seeing sopranos Isabel Leonard and Rosa Feola.  Best Picture, Best Director?  I think not.

I think better of Cooper's efforts than you do, but I much prefer Sam Wanamaker's Bernsteinish-conductor in "The Competition." (Worst channeling of Bernstein and also one of the worst depictions of a conductor I've ever seen - John Cassavetes flailing away in the Columbo episode "Etude in Black.")

Also, not enough lines like "For me, nobody handles Handel the way you handle Handel."

 

[On Pointe]

Interesting interview with the Bernstein children,  mainly because of what they don't say.  They present an image of idyllic family life,  with parents who "adored each other",  and never fought in front of them,  although they did " sense some tension" at times.  No mention of LB leaving their mother to live with a male lover,  which had to have been painful for them.

 

 

[dirac]

Jamie's book "Famous Father Girl" is a good read. The idyllic part seems to have been true as far as it went - the good times were really good. There were bad times too, like pretty much every other family, only this one had Leonard Bernstein in it.

[dirac]

On 12/24/2023 at 4:12 PM, Drew said:

Speaking of movie-Felicia--she was very explicit she didn't expect Bernstein to be anyone other than he was and she understood that this approach to their marriage would only work if it wasn't done as any kind of "sacrifice" on her part.  But the movie then shows her in what seemed to me various passive-aggressive moments that made crystal clear she was bothered by his choices, and even showed her oh-so-subtly playing the martyr .  This may be humanly understandable, but to me the character (as written) seemed  arrogant and dishonest (to herself if no-one else) for thinking she had the key to living with Lenny when very obviously she didn't. I felt somewhat vindicated--and more sympathetic towards the character-- when late in the film, during a lunch at the Plaza or some such, Felicia herself says these two things: that she had been "arrogant" for thinking she didn't need Lenny's attention the way everyone else around him did and then adds ruefully something like "so who is dishonest?"

I think one thing that kept me from responding more generously to the character in the early part of the film, is that I felt the movie was trying to hector me into falling in love with her (I mentioned her entrance in the earlier post). Anyway, it's just an odd quirk of how I responded. I did find the later parts of the movie pretty compelling and was happy we got a chunk of Mahler.

(Had it been more of a movie about Bernstein's career as "maestro" it would have been interesting to fit in something about how he helped to make Mahler a mainstay of concert halls--with  Mahler also another ambivalently Jewish figure. But that would be a different movie...)

Well, she was young and in love. While Felicia was obviously more sophisticated and better prepared for life with a gay man than many women of that era (Rachel Kempson, for example, thought that Michael Redgrave could be cured by the love of a good woman), I thought one of the better aspects of "Maestro" was that it demonstrated how you can enter a marriage or long-term relationship ostensibly knowing what you're "in for" and still be unable to protect yourself from hurt and loneliness, particularly if you feel with a certain amount of justice that the other party isn't keeping up his end of the bargain. (You can't even say you were deceived.:))  As Jamie has said, her mother married a "tsunami."

[Anthony_NYC]

9 hours ago, dirac said:

Well, she was young and in love. While Felicia was obviously more sophisticated and better prepared for life with a gay man than many women of that era (Rachel Kempson, for example, thought that Michael Redgrave could be cured by the love of a good woman), I thought one of the better aspects of "Maestro" was that it demonstrated how you can enter a marriage or long-term relationship ostensibly knowing what you're "in for" and still be unable to protect yourself from hurt and loneliness, particularly if you feel with a certain amount of justice that the other party isn't keeping up his end of the bargain. (You can't even say you were deceived.:))  As Jamie has said, her mother married a "tsunami."

Well, maybe a little self-deceived.

As for Cothran’s relationship with Bernstein, it seems to me Cooper would have had to invent most of the details in order to tell that story. 

[Petra]

Quote

As for Cothran’s relationship with Bernstein, it seems to me Cooper would have had to invent most of the details in order to tell that story. 

That's definitely not the movie that Cooper was interested in making, but I'd love to see that story and wouldn't mind a fictionalized version. IMHO one of the problems in recent biopics is the need or desire for them to be Balanchine Trust level authorized by the estate or the surviving family of the subject. The Agony and the Ecstasy isn't necessarily accurate but it certainly made me interested in Michelangelo and his art.

[On Pointe]

3 hours ago, Anthony_NYC said:

Well, maybe a little self-deceived.

As for Cothran’s relationship with Bernstein, it seems to me Cooper would have had to invent most of the details in order to tell that story. 

Roger Ebert often said that it was the obligation of the critic to review the film that the writer and director made,  not the one the critic wished they had made.  Of course viewers whose opinions aren't going to appear in print or on a website have no such restriction,  but I've read so many opinions on Maestro written by specialists who can't accept that,  like it or not,  Bradley Cooper told the story he wanted to tell.  Before this film,  I'd never heard of Tom Cothran,  and now that I have heard of him,  I wouldn't necessarily have been interested in his relationship with Bernstein any more than what we see in the film.  Maestro is about Lenny and Felicia.

I am left wondering why the Bernsteins married each other in the first place.  Lots of women find out their husbands are gay years after the wedding,  but Felicia knew that from the jump.  The Fancy Free/On the Town sequence indicates that they found each other dazzling and irresistible.  At first.  Maybe that was enough at the time.