Jason McDonald/Netflix
VENICE, Italy—Leonard Bernstein is off the deep end—watch as he dives in! For Bradley Cooper’s second film as a director, he has once again given himself the role of a tortured artist supported through thick and thin by a woman who cannot fully understand his creative genius. But the miracle of Maestro is that something works here; the actors invest, there is feeling and heart and style, which amply compensate for some of the more iffy touches and longueurs.
Maestro, which premiered Saturday at the Venice Film Festival, begins in the most hackneyed of ways, with a misty-eyed Bernstein reminiscing about his late wife for a documentary being made about him in his later years. Everything here sets off alarm bells, from the corniness of that set-up to the dodgy SNL-style accent adopted by Cooper, coiffed and be-nosed and seemingly ready to let rip in the actin’ stakes.
And for long stretches things really do seem to be heading in the wrong direction, as the film steers headlong into all the pitfalls of the genre: famous characters are name-dropped; exposition clangs; there’s a saccharine meet-cute between Bernstein and his wife, Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). Maestro’s goals are uncertain: Are we watching a portrayal of musicianship, or a dissection of a couple, or is this a project about Bernstein’s public and private selves? It’s uncertain that Maestro quite gets there in terms of depicting Bernstein as a musician, and the sexuality stuff is handled quite weirdly, putting Bernstein’s homosexual activities on the back-burner.