'Maestro' is the Biopic's Biopic, a Movie Aspiring to Movie-ness.

Bradley Cooper's Leonard Bernstein conducts symphonies, beds men and women, and daydreams about being a fart.

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I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that I may not be as fascinated with the act of conducting as Hollywood directors. They love it! Simply cannot get enough. First there was Tár, and now there’s Maestro, with a signature, seven-minute long sequence of Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein conducting a massive symphony performance of Gustav Mahler’s… something something (wasn’t Mahler also the centerpiece production in Tár? What is it with Mahler?).

Cooper’s eyes shine, sweat collects in his ringlets (the hair person on Maestro does an incredible job, it must be said), and he just keeps on jabbing and batonning his little heart out, so taken he is with the music. Lost in it. Dedicated to it. His most demanding mistress. On and on the scene goes, you can practically hear Bradley Cooper pausing to practice his Oscars speech in the mirror.

Conducting a symphony has come to be seen as the pinnacle of artistic, cultural achievement, and a throwback to an idea of mass intellectualism we like to imagine we once shared. Even Danny Boyle and Aaron Sorkin used it as their central metaphor in the Steve Jobs movie. An angry Steve Wozniak, played by Seth Rogen, presses Michael Fassbender’s Jobs on what Jobs, who can’t code, actually does at Apple: “I play the orchestra,” goes Jobs’ response. “And you’re a good musician.”

He’s the conductor! The ultimate smart guy! Even the holographic touch screens, so pervasive in futuristic sci-fi — see Tom Cruise moving videos around in Minority Report — are a version of this. We see a little guy moving invisible vibrations around with his hands and some part of our lizard brains convinces us that it’s magic.

At least in Tár there’s a satirical edge to the idea of the symphony conductor-as-ultimate-avatar-of-intellectual-pursuits. That edge has disappeared entirely in Maestro, which can’t seem to differentiate between high culture and the trappings of it.

Cooper, who also directs (with the full blessing of the Bernstein clan, natch) is still a brilliant actor, and just as in his debut, A Star is Born, seems to inspire compelling portrayals from his entire cast (Sarah Silverman as Bernstein’s sister, Shirley, was a nice treat). Maestro is certainly a movie, a picture even, though what exactly it’s meant to convey beyond sumptuous production values is less clear.

Much of the film concerns Bernstein’s relationship with Felicia Montealegre Cohn, played by Carey Mulligan. Montealegre Cohn was the daughter of a Costa Rican mother and an American mining executive father and was raised mostly in Chile, which she explains to a rapt Bernstein in an early scene. Mulligan plays Cohn with a mid-Atlantic accent as affected as Katherine Hepburn with consonants that could cut glass — like someone cranked the treble knob all the way to the right until it was nice and crispy. The Mid-Atlantic thing is easy to explain: Montealagre Cohn was an actor in the 1940s and 50s, after all. Why she sounds so clipped and Germanic is less clear. Whether it’s accidental or deliberate, Mulligan is unshakably consistent with it, an objectively impressive performer even when I’m not entirely buying what she’s selling.

So why am I not buying it? While I’m not a Felicia Montealegre Cohn scholar, watching Maestro gives me the sense that they studied some films of the real actress, heard her public performance voice, and sort of copy-pasted it to her private and personal life. It’s similar to what Natalie Portman does in Jackie or Kristen Stewart in Spencer. These actors should maybe do less studying and more imagining.

In the same way I don’t quite believe that Abraham Lincoln spoke all the time in the verbose, intricate palaver popular in 19th century political speeches, I don’t entirely believe mid-century actors used that flawlessly jaded, Mid-Atlantic radio voice all of the time. I don’t think Lincoln was doing inaugural speeches when he stubbed his toe; that he was giving Gettysburg addresses to his dogs. To take a public figure’s public-facing side and just extrapolate it to their entire private life feels stilted and fan-fictiony, as if the storyteller believes or wants us to believe that the facade was the whole. This is typical of Maestro’s entire approach, a series of romanticized vignettes that never dig too deep.

Cooper’s “Lenny” Bernstein meets his Felicia at a wonderfully glamorous 1940s New York City house party, where everyone is an actor or a writer or a musician and they perform little skits for each other for fun. This scene is probably as romanticized as Cohn’s accent, but whereas listening to affected Mid-Atlantic is kind of annoying, I actually want to get swept up in the dream of New York City as the mid-century salon, populated exclusively by artists and intellectuals on the make who challenge and inspire one another.

With the entire sequence rendered in dramatic black and white (I am begging filmmakers to stop using black and white as shorthand for something happening in the past), Lenny and Felicia soon embark upon a whirlwind courtship, in spite of Bernstein being a fairly open bisexual (he wakes up naked with a boyfriend in the first scene). Their flirtatious banter vacillates between Two Great Intellectuals speechifying to each other, as imagined by a worshipful auteur, and even more stilted takes on them being “fun and normal.” In one scene, as Bernstein lies on the floor with Montealegre Cohn in post-coital reverie, he pontificates about wanting to be the air that she farts. Oh daaahling, you ah simply too much!

In another scene, they sit back to back in Central Park on a gloriously sunny day, the camera coming down from the trees and swooping around them as Bernstein tells her to close her eyes and try to imagine a number he’s thinking of. Two. No. Seven. No, concentrate harder, dahling! Eight. No! Ah ha ha ha ha ha! They laugh and laugh at each other’s hilarious games, just like in old episodes of Full House, when uncle Joey would perform some remarkably bland stand-up and the camera would cut to audiences rolling around the floor like a crowd shot from Def Comedy Jam.

It feels a bit like even Cooper (and co-writer Josh Singer) don’t quite believe their own portrait of romanticized intellectualism, so they try to compensate with Bernstein and Montealegre acting cute and normal. But they’re so incapable of imagining them as anything other than their own idealized notions of intellectuals that the banter comes off preposterous. I want to be your fart! Guess my number! Ha ha!

The essential arc of the relationship is that Montealegre Cohn thinks she can be okay with Bernstein’s bisexuality (or more accurately his constantly philandering version of bisexuality), and then realizes too late that she can’t be. They resent each other over this for a time, but eventually accept a more open kind of love on her deathbed. It is compelling and cinematic, with so many feelings between them left unsaid and yearnings unacknowledged. Yet everything about their lifestyle is so opulent and grandiloquent, flitting between glorious estates and leafy idyll all over the east coast and Europe, that it feels like we’re never quite getting to what’s real, only to the most cinematic facsimiles of it.

I found myself simultaneously more interested in Leonard Bernstein’s work, and the brilliance that afforded him this lifestyle than I thought I would be, and frustrated with the movie for only giving us the briefest glimpses and most surface-level depictions of it. It seems like he liked to screw and party and be constantly feted as a genius everywhere he went, but the precise nature of that genius I can only really guess at. I think it was something to do with how he waved the baton around? Boy, look at him go!

Seven minutes of Bernstein conducting a symphony doesn’t really convey what Bernstein loved about music (composing, conducting, teaching, recording) or why he was so great at it. It’s a kind of cinematic shorthand. And that’s what Maestro is, mostly, a collection of emotional beats that are grandly cinematic without being especially insightful.