Maestro
★★★★
Maestro is a masterclass on how to act with a cigarette constantly dangling from your mouth. Oh yeah, it's also a film about a real-life musical genius, Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper), that focuses more on his fraught partnership with his wife Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) than on his musical process. This will either draw you more towards the film or away from it. Cooper, who also is the director and co-writer of this film, obviously is fascinated with Bernstein's passion and outgoing personality. It's always interesting when famous, established actors latch onto a biopic like this because you start reading more into why the actor themselves is so drawn to the material. Does Cooper think he's on the level of Bernstein's brilliance? Does Cooper deal with the emotional depression that Bernstein dealt with?
These questions can't help but draw you out of the film a bit, but its undeniable that Cooper is just as talented behind the camera as he is in front of it. What I enjoyed most about Maestro is that you feel every bit of passion from Cooper's performance, camera movements and style. Once I settled into the fact this movie was about two people rather than Bernstein's actual work, I was pretty hooked. Yes, I think I would have liked to see a little bit more about what made Bernstein so great instead of the characters always spouting about what makes him so great, but for me, it didn't take away from some engrossing scenes that I couldn't take my eyes off of (the Thanksgiving parade fight, Bernstein flat out lying to his daughter). Mulligan is just as terrific as Cooper but in completely different ways. Despite the pageantry that the Bernstein character brings to this movie, it's Mulligan's performance that grounds it in many ways. You can feel that Cooper is pulling from every bag of tricks, and by doing that, Maestro feels like a montage of styles. But it's sure fun to take all of it in.
