Maestro (2023)
Country: US
Technical: col/bw/1.85:1/1.33:1 129m
Director: Bradley Cooper
Cast: Bradley Cooper, Carey Mulligan, Sarah Silverman, Maya Hawke
Synopsis:
Leonard Bernstein reflects on his undying thirst for music and lust for life, and their sometimes destructive effects on his marriage.
Review:
Cooper and Singer's treatment takes its cue from a Bernstein quote about the nature of art being about contradictions held in check, and serves us a reading of the man's personal, rather than professional life, no doubt on the basis that everything that could be said about his approach to music making has already been said, not least by the subject. Thus, whether or not you consider him to have been bisexual, or a homosexual who happened to get married (the film nudges towards the latter), the figure of Felicia becomes the person who sustained him in all his manifold stances vis-à-vis music, and all his relationships with other men... up to a point. The writer-producer-director-star's impersonation, however well achieved, remains just that, however - and sacrifices audibility in straining for those Bernstein 'gravel tones' - but visually he makes some intriguing choices, with entire scenes completed in master shot, and the five-minute performance of the closing pages of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony is as brazen as it is mesmerising, a gamble that paid off. Another sequence has Lenny and Felicia sublimated in a fantasy rendition of a ballet from On the Town that says more about the whirlwind she is unleashing than any amount of equivocation on the part of the maestro. And finally, that title: somehow seems far too weak a peg on which to hang this portrait of such a voracious, multifaceted artist.
Country: US
Technical: col/bw/1.85:1/1.33:1 129m
Director: Bradley Cooper
Cast: Bradley Cooper, Carey Mulligan, Sarah Silverman, Maya Hawke
Synopsis:
Leonard Bernstein reflects on his undying thirst for music and lust for life, and their sometimes destructive effects on his marriage.
Review:
Cooper and Singer's treatment takes its cue from a Bernstein quote about the nature of art being about contradictions held in check, and serves us a reading of the man's personal, rather than professional life, no doubt on the basis that everything that could be said about his approach to music making has already been said, not least by the subject. Thus, whether or not you consider him to have been bisexual, or a homosexual who happened to get married (the film nudges towards the latter), the figure of Felicia becomes the person who sustained him in all his manifold stances vis-à-vis music, and all his relationships with other men... up to a point. The writer-producer-director-star's impersonation, however well achieved, remains just that, however - and sacrifices audibility in straining for those Bernstein 'gravel tones' - but visually he makes some intriguing choices, with entire scenes completed in master shot, and the five-minute performance of the closing pages of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony is as brazen as it is mesmerising, a gamble that paid off. Another sequence has Lenny and Felicia sublimated in a fantasy rendition of a ballet from On the Town that says more about the whirlwind she is unleashing than any amount of equivocation on the part of the maestro. And finally, that title: somehow seems far too weak a peg on which to hang this portrait of such a voracious, multifaceted artist.
Country: US
Technical: col/bw/1.85:1/1.33:1 129m
Director: Bradley Cooper
Cast: Bradley Cooper, Carey Mulligan, Sarah Silverman, Maya Hawke
Synopsis:
Leonard Bernstein reflects on his undying thirst for music and lust for life, and their sometimes destructive effects on his marriage.
Review:
Cooper and Singer's treatment takes its cue from a Bernstein quote about the nature of art being about contradictions held in check, and serves us a reading of the man's personal, rather than professional life, no doubt on the basis that everything that could be said about his approach to music making has already been said, not least by the subject. Thus, whether or not you consider him to have been bisexual, or a homosexual who happened to get married (the film nudges towards the latter), the figure of Felicia becomes the person who sustained him in all his manifold stances vis-à-vis music, and all his relationships with other men... up to a point. The writer-producer-director-star's impersonation, however well achieved, remains just that, however - and sacrifices audibility in straining for those Bernstein 'gravel tones' - but visually he makes some intriguing choices, with entire scenes completed in master shot, and the five-minute performance of the closing pages of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony is as brazen as it is mesmerising, a gamble that paid off. Another sequence has Lenny and Felicia sublimated in a fantasy rendition of a ballet from On the Town that says more about the whirlwind she is unleashing than any amount of equivocation on the part of the maestro. And finally, that title: somehow seems far too weak a peg on which to hang this portrait of such a voracious, multifaceted artist.