‘Maestro’ Review: An Inarticulate Look Into Leonard Bernstein’s Complex Life

Image via Netflix

This review was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike by a member of SAG-AFTRA. This film would not exist without the labor of the actors currently on strike for fair wages and working conditions. No money was exchanged for this review.

Leonard Bernstein’s legacy has been sacrificed at the altar of Bradley Cooper’s Academy Award dreams in the bleak and overwrought Maestro. Bernstein’s musical accomplishments are relegated to mere footnotes in the film, as Cooper hones in on the more “shocking” elements of his storied life in hopes of courting critical acclaim as an actor, director, and scribe. Like most successful men who become the topics of big-budget biopics, Bernstein was a complicated man whose life was rife with interpersonal drama and burned bridges—but Maestro fails to give his flaws any deeper consideration. 

There is nothing thoughtful about the way Cooper digs through the affairs of the long-dead man, opting instead to be glib and quite accusatory about Bernstein’s actions without any nuanced examination. His motives are often obscured by heavy-handed attempts at shock, which masquerades as something meaningful. Perhaps this is why Cooper opens the film with Bernstein’s own words: “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.” But Maestro fails to provoke any meaningful questions beyond “why was this film made?” 

Maestro opens with an interview with an aging Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) as he fumbles through a performance at the piano in his home. The scene is designed to set the tone for the film—his words about his late wife are tinged with regret, but even then they come across like half-hearted emotions, as if they are etched into a glass for a commemoration. The shallow depth of etched glass is the extent to which Bernstein’s emotions are explored throughout the remainder of the film. 

As a director, screenwriter, and actor, Cooper seems uncertain about who Bernstein was, both professionally and personally. His musical accomplishments are brushed aside—unless they’re used to allow Cooper to conduct an orchestra for an agonizingly long scene—and his personal relationships feel like a farce. He might court and marry Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) and boast about sleeping with David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer) but the “relationship” aspect of both relationships is lost to an aimless script that even treats the latter tryst as nothing more than a joke. 

Maestro takes a rather inarticulate approach to Bernstein’s sexuality, by painting his bisexuality as the root of his marital troubles, instead of his flagrant cheating and callous personality. Rather than casting his bisexuality in the familiar shades of purple and blue, Cooper sets the scene with a villainous red hue. It leans into the misnomer that bisexual people are prone to adulterous affairs because they want a little bit of everything, and Maestro avoids questioning why Bernstein had affairs with men and women throughout his marriage. Cooper seems ignorant of the larger legacy that Bernstein held within the community, completely avoiding his humanitarian causes, his civil rights activism, and his fundraising for those affected by the HIV/AIDS crisis. It reduces a man with a considerable legacy—both good and bad—to a handful of tawdry choices. 

Carey Mulligan is Maestro’s sole redeeming quality. She rises above the odious script, elevating each scene that she graces, which is a tremendous task when acting opposite Cooper’s self-aggrandizing performance. Her emotions are easily accessible for the audience and her pain is palpable as she endures the ups and downs of her marriage to Leonard. With the care that is given to her role, it seems that Cooper found Felicia to be the more sympathetic and compelling character to approach and perhaps Maestro should have been her story—without all the awkward uncertainty about how to delve into Bernstein’s capricious existence. 

‘Maestro’ Fails to Live Up to Expectations 

Image via Netflix

Bradley Cooper’s sophomore outing as a writer-director falls tragically flat when compared to his enjoyable A Star Is Born redux. His direction feels uninspired here, as though playing Bernstein took up too much of his focus, leaving him to phone it in with visual intrigue. Maestro is filled with prolonged and quite uninteresting transition scenes, which bring nothing to the already stagnant framing he chooses to employ throughout the film. 

While Bernstein’s children may take no offense to Cooper’s obvious nose-job, there is something ghoulish about the caricature it makes of one of the most important figures in classical music in the 20th century, who happened to also be a Jewish man who rose to prominence in a time where being Jewish made success difficult. The film makes light of this fact via an oddly paced scene where a peer of Bernstein’s suggests that he change his name to Berns to fit in, without so much of a mention of the fact that Bernstein had already used an Americanized pseudonym when he moved to New York City. 

His Jewishness is an afterthought, much like every other important detail of his existence beyond his quarrelsome love life, relegated to a sweatshirt with Hebrew text and a fast-talking accent that seems ill-suited for the Pennsylvania-born Cooper. Maestro glosses over how remarkable it was that Bernstein rose to fame with World War II playing out in the background, and how his heritage influenced his music. It also avoids the political excitement of his existence—missing out on exploring how he and Felicia raised funds for the Black Panther Party, how he faced blacklisting by the United States Department of State, and how he was an outspoken supporter of nuclear disarmament. While a biopic doesn’t have to touch on every noteworthy action of its subject, it shouldn’t carelessly reduce them to a handful of their more unsavory actions. 

Maestro is a shameful attempt at telling Leonard Bernstein’s complex history, and it fails to impress at every turn. Cooper may have been a solid choice as a director for the film, but he was the wrong man to tell Bernstein’s story and a poor choice to play the role. Bernstein may have been a troubled man, but Cooper’s bumbling flailing is a mockery of a man who played a part in crafting the soundtrack of the 20th century and today. 

Final Verdict: C- 

Maestro is set for a limited theatrical release on November 22, 2023, before it arrives on Netflix on December 20, 2023. Find showtimes now and watch the trailer below: