Maestro (2023)

I think Maestro is a hard film to love. Its main character is difficult and inscrutable. And yet… Bradley Cooper's film does love him very much, and it’s very generous with him. I found this carefully and just a bit coldly (or perhaps I mean exactingly) directed. 

Here's one example of what I mean. After the premier of Bernstein's Mass Leonard and Felicia have a terrible fight while their kids are in the other room and the Thanksgiving Day parade is going on behind them outside the windows. It's kind of an amazing sequence because the camera gives us the entire thing in longshot. We never get access to their faces. It's as if the fight, even for the characters, is happening to someone else. We simply watch this fight unfold without being let in. And the sequence is not short, so this choice becomes very apparent very quickly.

Another example is the way the camera lingers with Leonard or Felicia when they make a difficult decision or tell a lie, and we sit there. Unlike, let's just say, the quick fade to black that we got with Coppola's Priscilla, Cooper makes his characters squirm. They have to sit and stew in their choices, deal with them, live with them. This happens several times, but one of my favorites is when Leonard lies to his oldest daughter about the rumors she's heard at school. Felicia tells him he has to lie to her, so he does, but then we watch what that has cost him.

There are many beautiful directorial choices like this involving light and shadow and other wonderful ways Cooper asks the camera to look at these characters, many of which I just wanted to applaud, even while sitting in my seat. My absolute favorite of these, though, is when Leonard returns to his lover David for the first time after spending a long weekend with Felicia and falling in love with her. He tells David that he and Felicia are off to lunch but that he should meet them for a drink later, and then he quickly apologizes I didn't mean to spring that on you... maybe that was insensitive of me. The camera, though, never goes to Leonard. We stay with David the whole time, we watch what this revelation means to him, and we watch him have to manage his own shock and grief so that he can be polite with Leonard in front of Felicia. It's an incredible scene.

I really liked Maestro and I respected it a lot. It’s wonderfully acted. Carey Mulligan is luminous. Bradley Cooper is wonderful. And I thought Matthew Bomer was excellent in his small part. Cooper’s direction is so exacting and careful. I find myself just in love with him and his choices more than the movie itself. This sounds like I didn’t like the movie. But I did. I liked it a lot! I just am finding it hard to love, perhaps because the man himself was so hard to handle once people chose to love him.

P.S. For people complaining that they wanted the movie to be more about Bernstein's music... ok, I guess. But it isn't about that; this movie is about Bernstein's relationship with Felicia Montealegre.