“A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.” This is the Leonard Bernstein quote that opens Bradley Cooper’s produced, directed, co-written, and starring role in Maestro. This quadruple role-playing by Cooper in one of the biggest films of Netflix’s year has become a huge Awards contender during its limited theatrical run. Even nabbing some more praise now that critic groups and industry circles have recognized it as one of the year’s best films across most of the ‘above the line’ categories - Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Screenplay, Cinematography, Editing, etc. This circuit recognition at the dawn of another season that’ll lead to an exhausted Academy Awards show in a few months is the only logical starting point in talking about Maestro. It is a film where its worth can only be talked about in relation to the pointless half-measures of awards and not the supposed “provoked tensions of art” quote that opens the film.
Bradley Cooper has been nominated for nine Academy Awards in the acting category and has yet to win one. This is by no means an assessment of his talents for not walking away with a statue, as he is a mighty fine actor who can be richly funny and dramatically interesting. Not much is different in Maestro. Cooper is notable as the monumental Bernstein, but who is Leonard Bernstein? Cooper’s performance fails to express who this man was, and the script - in equal parts - does even more to provoke less of the details that inhabit the structure of his figure. Regardless of the make-up, hairstyling, inflections in his voice, and gestures of his composure, none of it is informative of Bernstein and what this story is trying to pull from him.
Despite his recent successes, the script’s co-writer, Josh Singer (The Post, Spotlight, First Man), seems to have no grasp on this figure either. Like many other award darlings, the script seems to only work in service of recognizing effort rather than implementing an artistic meaning beyond baseline comprehension. This makes the first moment so confounding as Bernstein’s quote is profound and seemingly personal, but none of the film seems to be informed by the subject. That isn’t to say Maestro should be a chronological bullet point of Wiki-storytelling that leaves little room for subjectivity, but it should (at the very least) use the subject to inform the style, and yet, Maestro illustrates a faux interpretation of substantial information.
Maestro has all of the simple procedures and recognizable techniques that accompany a film designed to hit a circuit full steam ahead, but it’s the exact pandering to that market you should come to expect. Regardless of Matthew Libatique’s talents as a cinematographer, his composition is fine, but the images bound by the Academy ratio are stunningly flat. The images are often filled with ‘effort’, but it registers as performative without the necessary theatrics required to infiltrate them with meaning. Which isn’t helped by the editing either. For a film about someone who became one of the great composers of the 20th century, there is no rhythm to the narrative beats or emotional crescendos. Including the biggest scene of the film that required Cooper to spend six years training to emulate a conductor. The magnitude of the scene is large in scale, audibly loud, and certainly performed, but the camera fails to harness what this moment means to Bernstein. We do not know why we’re there, or what the scene is trying to say about Cooper’s gobs of sweat beating down his face in his expressively passionate dance. Most of the movie could be diluted down to just that. Why are we here? What is this saying about Leonard and Felicia? Why does it seem like it’s about Cooper more than Bernstein?
The film spans decades, eventually switching from a classic black and white filter to warm, autumnal colors without any narrative reason as to why that is, but that too is a mirage. The choice doesn’t need to be explained as Nolan did with Oppenheimer, but it must be informed by the story so that we can understand the intent and purpose. It seems like none of the choices were made so that we could extrapolate the weight of Bernstein’s choices throughout his life, let alone what that might mean to his wife Felicia. The entire film is delivered in a manner that tries to say something personal, profound, or poetic about complicated gestures of art and love, but the philosophies are empty-handed. They grasp at hot air, failing to be remotely succinct diatribes about anything pertaining to the methods of having to balance fame and family from the perspectives of Leonard or Felicia.
Maestro won’t go down as an over-nominated biopic for playing it safe or being technically and narratively incompetent like Bohemian Rhapsody was, but it should be recognized as an egregious example of being “the most movie” that should entail some awards. Despite fine performances from Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan - who hardly internalize an emotion worth talking about - Maestro works really hard to embellish a season full of movies like it, and then act like it’s any different for not following the lukewarm degrees of other biopics. It doesn’t matter if Libatique can impose the shadow of Bernstein over Felicia’s isolated ‘want’ within the chest of his physique, the image is empty because it is working in service of votes more than the story. Each detail - from the costuming, cadences, and match-cuts - is technically, chemically, and artificially engineered for an awards body that can only value merit based on presentation rather than the expansive proportions of meaning. The methods are so insignificant because it is easier to rave about scenes full of commotion rather than having to work to identify the emotions that bind the performances to larger, more meaningful concepts.
Bernstein is right to say that art doesn’t have to answer questions, but to make an entire work of art that doesn’t give the viewer an opportunity to identify the tension between questions is directly at odds with Bernstein’s perspective. It doesn’t seem like Bradley Cooper understands the material he’s working with at all. If the only interest in art is that it may accumulate accolades and decorate the vanity, then your interpretation of art contradicts the value that comes with the meaningful truth behind the revelations great art can provide. Maestro is not one of those revelatory examples no matter how hard it tries to convince us that it is.