Fuck yeah, I do! So many questions! Like, why the fuck did producer/director/star Bradley Cooper even make this movie? Did he wake up one morning and think to himself “You know what America needs to hear? It needs to hear how legendary composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein, having lost his way in life, ultimately found spiritual redemption by devoting himself to the care of his wife Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) when she was dying of breast cancer!”
Well, apparently he did, because that is what we’ve got. I had the same “Why did he make this picture” question for Christopher Nolan regarding his recent mega-hit Oppenheimer, even though Chris actually had a pretty good answer for me, to wit: “The Atomic Bomb, stupid!” Bradley’s answer is probably not “because I had to do something to wash away the stink of A Star Is Born”—though it damn well should be1—and though I suspect that he can’t come up with anything better than “because this is a story that had to be told!” But why?
Maestro is strikingly reminiscent of Oppenheimer both in subject matter and technique. Both are set in the milieu of a brilliant Jewish immigrant culture in the U.S.—whether one of physics or music—during the 1940s and 50s (though Maestro’s “arc” extends further), often very left wing (though this is drastically soft-pedaled in Maestro). All of the characters in the film are real, a great many of them famous, and are generally thrown at you so quickly that, unless you know that they are famous, and why, what happens doesn’t always make a lot of sense.2 Both films are structured in what is becoming the standard hip style—non chronological, with shifts between color and black and white that are supposed to follow some sort of “rule”, though what that “rule” is often escapes the casual (or thick-headed) viewer (like me). Both films also feature “imaginary” or symbolic sequences, which lets us see, among other things, Oppie humping some chick during his security hearing and Bernstein himself dancing with wife to be Felicia in the “On the Town”/“Fancy Free” sailors’ ballet that Bernstein wrote with choreographer Jerome Robbins, used by Gene Kelly in the film version of On the Town.3
But the payoffs in Maestro pale in comparison to those of Oppenheimer: there is no atom bomb, no carefully engineered smear and humiliation of the protagonist, contrived for purely personal reasons (in Oppie’s case by a vengeful Lewis Strauss), nor another contrived humiliation, this time of the protagonist’s tormenter.4 Instead, we get a painfully bourgeois morality tale: young genius, corrupted by success, finds peace and redemption by going back to the woman he truly loves.
Well, it’s a fact that Bernstein did care for Felicia during the last year of her life, when she did die of lung cancer in 1978, but it’s also a fact that he had left her two years earlier, announcing that he would now live openly as a gay man, with his assistant/lover Tom Cothran, who is vaguely alluded to in the film as more or less hanging around Bernstein and annoying the hell out of his family, but Bernstein’s openly announced departure from the closet is omitted from the film. Long after Felicia was dead, Bernstein would care for Cothran when he was dying of AIDS, as described in this fascinating article, Leonard Bernstein And I Loved The Same Man, by Peter Napolitano.
While the film is “open” about the fact that the Bernstein/Montealegre marriage was largely one of convenience, Bernstein’s identity as a gay man is consistently downplayed. The “real” Leonard Bernstein led a thunderously active gay life as a young man, sleeping with literally hundreds of young men (a different one every night, of course). Nor was he particularly secretive about his orientation. Once, while serving as “artist in residence” at some college, he conceived a crush on the dean, and, at his farewell party, drunkenly sang a painfully “incorrect” version of “A Bicycle Built for Two”, unfortunately rhyming “deanie” with “peenie”, “weenie”, “teeny”, and, even more unfortunately, “sheenie” (an antisemitic epithet that should be even more obscure than it is).5
At times the tone of Maestro could fairly described as “homo callous” if not actually homophobic, as when an irritated Felicia tells Lennie that if he isn’t careful he’ll end up as, yes, a “lonely old queen”, as if this is what happens to all gay guys when they get old, which I suspect is not necessarily true. The statement also implies that Felicia is saying that Bernstein has a “choice” as to whether he will be “normal” (and, I guess, “happy”) or gay and miserable—also a “controversial” position these days, I would say.
Curiously, there are also times in Maestro when the subtext of the film is almost too hip, as when Lennie’s sister Shirley (a “surprisingly” effective Sarah Silverman) tells Felicia she knows Lennie would suit her because “we have the same taste in men—unavailable”—that is to say, they’re lesbians—though if Felicia was a lesbian, the film certainly doesn’t follow through with this in the rest of the film—Felicia, though she had a fairly substantial career as an actress—and we see some this—is, most of the time, presented admiringly as a staunchly moralistic haus frau, concerned above all with her family and “propriety” and forcing her wayward husband to be worthy of her.
Yet at the same time the film tacks on a “gay friendly” conclusion when we see Bernstein teaching a master class in conducting, coming across at first as heartless old autocrat, brutally and unfeelingly correcting a sweet young black man over and over again, the white capitalist patriarchy in full roar. What’s the matter, kid? Can’t take it? Maybe you just don’t belong here. But then the kid gets it right, and an effusive Bernstein showers him with praise. And then we cut to a pretty ridiculous scene with Lennie hanging all over the kid on the dance floor, “dancing” to what New York Times critic Jennie Livingston informs me is “Shout” by Tears for Fears, whoever the fuck they are.6 It seems that the bourgeois ideal of selfless, life-long commitment has been discarded in favor of the more “pagan”, transactional approach, in which the young, beautiful, and talented grant sexual favors to those in power in exchange access to “opportunity”. As a young man, Bernstein had just such a relationship with legendary American composer Aaron Copeland, who, like Bernstein, “openly” sought popularity with such accessible, “American” compositions as Appalachian Spring and Billy the Kid.
Maestro also leaves out Lennie’s—and Felicia’s—earnest, left wing fellow traveling, culminating in the infamous “Black Panthers and the Beautiful People on the Upper West Side” bash that Felicia organized to raise funds for the Panthers, whose activities ranged between revolutionary activism and rape, theft, and murder, as described in this article in Wikipedia, the party itself dissected in ludicrously affected detail by Tom Wolfe in “Radical Chic”, a famous, 25,000 word article for New York magazine (5,000 would have been plenty). Wolfe, a closely closeted gay southerner who surely despised Lennie and all his works, nonetheless also surely knew his debt to Lennie for giving him the opportunity to show to the public what priceless, preening, virtue-signaling asses Lennie and all his beautiful friends were.
Afterwords
Bernstein was a man of almost inconceivable talent and energy, easily enough to generate three or four “great” careers, yet there was always a sense that the endless series of projects he undertook—and the great majority of the time finished—were “really” an escape—an escape for what he “should” be doing—composing the great works that would have established him as “the American Beethoven” perhaps—because he never had the complete confidence in his abilities that would allow him the “serenity” of genius—which is in itself often a myth, because many great works are produced out of envy or hunger for recognition rather than “serenity”.
Bernstein himself, of course, fed this image of Olympic sorrow in his later years. We see several “late” interviews of him, presumably based on fact, showing him looking like an unhappily dissipated Noël Coward, cigarette in hand—the only time in the film when he isn’t smoking, I think, is when he’s snorting cocaine7—looking and sounding exhausted and dispirited, refusing to be comforted by references to all his prior triumphs. And, in fact, the frenetic nature of his life suggests that this analysis is true—he never found a mature “style” that would let him create a coherent, substantial body of work. Instead, he left behind him a long trail of brilliant fragments, together with an extraordinary conducting career. If the final line on Lennie is unkind—that ultimately his ego did outrun his talents, that his longing for the one, grand, all-encompassing gesture led him, over and over again, to instead fall on his face—well, no one’s perfect. But I didn’t see much of this up there on the screen.
1. I disliked A Star Is Born, which Cooper both produced and directed, so much that I made fun of it twice—overkill, perhaps, for a film that I walked out on perhaps one hour in. The film struck me as an absurd star vehicle for Lady Gaga, with Bradley’s role largely constricted to a bass off with fellow profundo Sam Elliott, though I could easily believe that Cooper’s efforts were electronically enhanced. But the film grossed about half a billion dollars worldwide, and that can put an awful lot of wind beneath your wings.
2. For example, we’re introduced to Broadway jack and jills of all trades Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who created affectionate self-parodies of themselves in the Fred Astaire/Cyd Charisse classic, The Band Wagon (played by Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant), mostly as a nod to us cool kids who already know who they are.
3. Betty Comden and Adolph Green (see footnote 2, above) wrote the scripts for both On the Town and its “sequel” It’s Always Fair Weather. On the Town was a big hit (It’s Always Fair Weather was not), but to me it always had a “gelded gay” flavor that I found off-putting. Just three guys havin’ fun! Cause it’s just us guys! Three guys who love each other! Just havin’ fun! The ballet we see in Maestro, which seems to run on for an awfully long time, has the same ambiance. Bernstein and Robbins, of course, were both gay, and Gene seemed a lot more comfortable dancing with guys. In It’s Always Fair Weather, he somehow never gets around to dancing with his leading lady, which is something you might generally expect to happen in a musical.
4. Strauss’s tormenter was the otherwise unknown to history Democratic Senator Clinton Anderson of Arizona, whose Senate committee had jurisdiction over the Atomic Energy Commission, of which Strauss was the head. Strauss, who was personally irascible and possessed with extreme appetite for publicity, infuriated Anderson for years by ensuring that it was Lewis Strauss, and not Clinton Anderson, who was “Mr. Atomic Energy” to the American people. (At the time, some people had expectations for atomic energy similar to the expectations that people hold for “AI” now.)
5. I obtained this information from a book review of a biography of Bernstein that ran in the New Republic back in the 1990s. The review proved too unbuttoned for the Republic’s readers, who complained so bitterly that the magazine ran two apologies for running the piece. To the Republic’s editors’ credit, they then ran a letter from the author of the review, making fun of them for being such cowards. Funny stuff! (As a side note, Word recognizes both “peenie” and “weenie” as words.)
6. Presumably, the kid is down with this. I mean, this isn’t Harvey Weinstein territory, but, on the other hand, it’s not that far away. Metropolitan Opera conductor James Levine was recently forced to resign for liaisons that were less than consensual.
7. I’m pretty sure this is supposed to be “bad”. It’s always hard not to chuckle when “Hollywood” clucks its tongue at the White Lady.
I was not all that impress with Oppenheimer ,so I won’t be watching this one