Maestro (Bradley Cooper, 2023)

A film like this made sense in 1946 when Michael Curtiz told the story of Cole Porter as a brash heterosexual in Night and Day. For Bradley Cooper in 2023 to center a Leonard Bernstein biopic on bisexual Bernstein's marriage to Felicia Montealegre is no-steps-forward, six-steps-back Oscar-bait filmmaking. Bernstein's relationships with clarinetist David Oppenheim and musician Tom Cothran, for whom Berstein left Montealegre in the mid-1970s, are given offensively short shrift. The Bernstein-Montealegre marriage structures the entire film and so we get borderline homophobic synopses on Wikipedia such as "his homosexuality is diverted soon afterward, when he meets Felicia Montealegre." When Montealegre becomes ill with lung cancer, Bernstein returns to her and their three kids. Cooper places these scenes as the climax of the film, thus lending the impression that Bernstein's ultimate achievement was taking up his proper place within a heterosexual family unit. 

Even worse, centering such clueless representational politics results in a narratively unkempt film. Maestro comes across as a series of pins in a bulletin board - some musical sequences here, some discussions of craft there, one (can't have any more than one) coke-fueled gay party, all ever so briefly swirling around the heterosexual romance at the fulcrum. The only moments when the film comes alive are during the de facto (and welcome in this context) musical appreciation courses (e.g., when Bernstein is teaching conducting to a young acolyte) or when Cooper abandons the story altogether (the Mahler's Resurrection Symphony scene). A stunningly bad movie.

 

Grade: C-minus (upped a notch so I don't seem like a total crackpot)