Amidst the film’s real reason for existence, Cooper’s forgot to crack open the man at the center of his film. I have no idea if the conducting is accurate in Maestro, nor what any of the actions mean. I feel like it must be terribly distracting for an orchestral musician to have their conductor jumping up and down from his lectern with an orgasmic look on his face as he splashes the first row of strings with sweat. In his personal life, Maestro is no more illuminating beyond standard mid-century melodramatic tropes about his inability to live a true life, except for the fact that he lives amongst artists in New York City and his secret dalliances with men aren’t much of a secret at all. If ever a film needed the hacky stakes-establishing homophobia scene, it was this one. There’s a moment at the film’s midpoint when one of Bernstein’s lovers is sharing a box seat with him and Felicia, and the lover grabs Bernstein’s hand as they share a transcendent musical moment. A better film would dwell on this gesture, like who is this guy to do this in front of Felicia and who is Bernstein to accept it? Instead, she’s angry because of generalized infidelity, which is again not an uncommon sin in the marriages of far-less accomplished people. Maestro never surprises in the slivers of Bernstein’s life that it chooses to put on screen.
However, if a woman’s going to physically disintegrate in a movie, Carey Mulligan’s going to make it work. Cooper’s so deep in the prosthetics and the voice that there’s no functional difference between parody and imitation, but Mulligan gets to strip all that away when Felicia is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. The sadness towards the end of A Star is Born was palpable, and based on how emotionally evocative the last half hour of Maestro is, that might be Cooper’s milieu. These scenes are expected for the genre, but Cooper and especially Mulligan make them feel newly devastating. Cooper surely knows all the ways biopics are made, and by obscuring the professional part of Bernstein’s life and focusing on the romantic, he avoided the too-much problem that films like Napoleon fall into. Maestro’s problem is the rarer not-enough, where the marriage is only interesting based on the talent of the actors playing the parts. Was Lydia Tar right to idolize this guy? I’m left with as little sense of that as to whether or not the last act of Tar was a purgatorial dream. C