Maestro: Men at a Distance

We open with the words of Leonard Bernstein; “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them and it's essential meaning is an tension between the contradictory answers”. They are meant to function as both as a guide into understanding Bernstein and to understanding Director Bradley Cooper’s intention for this film. I left it wondering if it had accomplished either. There is a desire to reckon with a man, a desire to reckon with the distance between us and him, and most importantly it's director and him, that unconsciously sits in the womb of the entire movie, but is never birthed, and thus I left the movie stunted. Disconnected from any deep feelings of emotion or intellectual revelation and/or connection. I was left at a distance from Cooper’s authenticity and consequently from his subjects.

The tensions between these distances are most certainly presented, or at least they are talked about or mentioned a lot. Between his work life and home life, his straight marriage to Felicia Montealegre, and his queer selfhood, between his authentic self and the performer. The latter is the aspect most presented within this movie. It's in his words to a reporter, his words to trusted friends, it's in his sometimes overhearing need to share, and his over bearing needs which can “swallow up” those around him as Felicia says in one climactic argument. He is in constant performance, whether in show, in love, or in conversation, and it is the friction between that performance and his actual self the movie tries to reckon with, but also seems afraid to come close to. The other aforementioned tensions are merely dressing to the dressing, and in concert with this very ostentatious cavalcade of technique and the artifice of craft and genius, it gives one the feeling that you visited a grand costume ball that had absolutely little to no meaning save to prove the ability of the person throwing it. For a movie about love, there is very little in it. There is loyalty, and lots of understanding, and respect, words thrown at you at 100 miles per hour, camera movements to astound you, close ups, and pulls, wide shots and all other manner of accoutrements that are meant to accentuate this supposed story of the tensions on creativity, brilliance, and selfhood, but not love. The problem is all of these apparatuses serve to distance you from the subject and the music rather than bring you closer into. Instead of hugging us, Maestro’s incessant plays for prestige shrug us off. One scene has Bernstein being sort of cautiously nudged by a man he has a deep respect for to hide his name, one feels like this may be an entry way to a story about the tension in the sometimes short, sometimes long distances between Bernstein's (and really any non-white protestant male) Jewish identity and his very American success, but before we can even acknowledge what we are watching, Mulligan's Felicia is whispering into his ear to be his authentic self and whisking him off into their love story presented with an over head bird-eye shot that whips us into an entirely different space both physically and mentally. It's not a bad choice, falling in love can feel alot like this, but love isolated in a vacuum is not a story, the story is in its relation to subjects, it's distance from them -to them, so we still need to see how it is found between these two subjects, but before we can appreciate their love story we are treated to a flamboyantly shot dance scene with no actual flamboyance most especially when Cooper enters the scene ( a dancer he is not). The point here being tensions are presented in the same way a child may reply “present” during roll call, but they are not reckoned with, consolidated, or interstitched in any meaningful way. This all happens as Bernstein's queer life is as quietly placed into storage in the movie as it is depicted it was in his life.

Bernstein's queer-ness feels like an unfortunate aside, like bait to get is into caring about his all encompassing precarious but sweet love for Felicia and not just because of how little screen time they're given, but because whenever his sexuality does show up it feels as if the investment is cheap and disinterested. Matt Bomer’s David Oppenheim is not a fully realized person at all, he is a series of reactions stacked on top of each other in an overcoat pretending to look like one. We see him and are made privy to stifled butt taps, stiff kisses, and looks that are meant to communicate the subtext of longing, and laughs, but there is nothing there, in commentary or chemistry. His other trysts and affairs are not given enough time or energy to create friction, they merely pass by without rubbing up against. When they are intimate it seems so contrived and forced , I half expected to see Cooper wipe the kisses off after. There is no sensuality there, no fire. To be fair, it is the same with he and Felicia's relationship, but it's just that much more noticable when the foundation is next to nothing. Save for the beginning, we only see his queer lovers to see how they draw Felicia's ire. They seem to exist in a very rigid “either/or” of friendly, or implied sexual nature (sex itself is off limits) but there is not a modicum of the depth and nuance afforded his straight relationship. How can we reckon with Bernstein's “authentic self” when such a massive part of it is so obviously treated with petit disdain?

Cooper's film is at its best when it is focused on the silences, the unsaid between the beloved couple. When the distance it maintains from each, actually serves it's emotional objectives, and when it focuses on Carey Mulligans outstanding performance. In an over the shoulder shot of Mulligan peering out from underneath her facade of shiny acceptance to reveal her natural jealousy over the moments Leonard shares with his paramour, you feel as if she is a thousand miles away. The deafening silence in a room after an argument as a balloon passed a window from the parade outside, betrays a dire loneliness in both of them. The distance between the camera and Leonard and Felecia as the camera sits well outside the fence of the pool area from which they try and talk about what is going on between them, and a close up of Mulligan in a monologue detailing her revelation that the woman she claimed to be was merely a conjured ideal to try and reconcile her love for the entirety of Bernstein with her organic sense of possession. These are scenes where I felt strongest that the movie was near accomplishing it's goal of reckoning with these tensions without answering them or preaching them to its audience. It was most distracted when it focused on its own obtrusive beauty and Coopers equally showy performance. Let me be clear, I did not like Cooper's performance. It is without a doubt the most distracting aspect of this film, and one of the worst in contention for an Oscar in recent history. Sure it is fervently ambitious, and there is detail, and I do see love there. Cooper's own tension as an artist I believe are a mirror image of sorts to the Bernstein he sees, and in moments Cooper's own vulnerabilities shine, but there are moments where that ambition and that desire overtake and choke out any ability to actually connect with Bernstein. It is an aggressively nasally performance, in which everything extends out from Bernstein's nose. A lot was made of that nose in particular, and while I don't agree with the takes that were presented to try and paint this as somewhat anti-Semitic, the focus is a poor choice to decide that this is where Bernstein vocally, in some ways spiritually speaks to us from. You have the prosthetic nature of the nose, but you also have the fact that Cooper is speaking through it to try and imitate Bernstein's vocal tenor. The experiment is a cinematic failure, it doesn't serve to bring intimacy between the audience and Leonard, but rather it distances us, constantly reminding us that this is Bradley Cooper playing Leonard Bernstein. We are supposed to say “My god he has really channeled this man” but best I can give is “Look how hard he is trying”. The gestures and the movements feel accurate enough, true enough, but everything coming from the inside reeks of effort that we should not be seeing, and in this veers it into the realm of Oscar bait. Once again this is also a place where the silences are the best. A scene where he has to put a pillow to his mouth to muffle his tear filled grief, a concert hall scene, (maybe the only) that in its movements , along with Cooper's show Bernstein's love and affinity for the music he was making even while Cooper himself is silent.

This is not a film that (as it states in the beginning) in any way sticks to one's bones to reckon with the tensions and agitations it is happy just to put on display. Its a movie that puts the clothing in the window to draw the eye, but the door to the store is locked. I came into the movie knowing very little about Bernstein and I came out of the movie still knowing very little about Bernstein. I came in very far removed from him, and left only a few steps closer, enough to we that he lived his wife deeply. If that was the movies one true goal it is fine enough of a goal, but those opening words in the quote do not speak to simply a complicated love story, but to something more, much more. A complicated man, a complicated genius, living in a complicated world in a complicated body. Cooper and co. seem to misunderstand and mistake the presentation of complexity as the expression of complexity. The complexity on display is banal, it's just presented with the sort of pomp that makes it seem like more. I wish more of the movie was like those scenes of silence. I wish the movie had the agitative daring of Mulligan’s compartmentalized performance. I wish Bernstein’s queer self was more welcome to the party, and I wish someone else was playing Bernstein instead of Cooper to allow Cooper to remain completely and totally married to the man, the subject, from the perspective he most seems comfortable with …a distance.