In his first film as director since A Star is Born, Cooper captures the life of the great conductor with head-spinning ambition and emotion
The big, honking problem with Maestro – Bradley Cooper’s long-planned biopic of the conductor Leonard Bernstein – was, per the early buzz, as plain as the nose on its star-slash-writer-slash-director’s face. When a trailer was released online last month, social media bristled at the prospect of a non-Jewish actor using facial prosthetics to play a Jewish figure. Not an issue, shot back Bernstein’s own children, all three of whom had been involved with the project. “Bradley chose to use makeup to amplify his resemblance,” they said, “and we’re perfectly fine with that.”
In the wake of the film’s premiere at Venice this evening, it’s hard to stress just how unfortunately cut that trailer turned out to be. Cooper’s nose doesn’t just look natural, but wholly inconspicuous: in a film whose every frame is crammed with sumptuous, show-offy craft, it virtually qualifies as a background detail. Maestro is the first film the Hangover star has directed since his tremendous 2018 reimagining of A Star is Born – and while it lacks that picture’s stoutly carpentered emotional thump, it more than makes up for it in head-spinning ambition and ravishingly staged individual scenes. When we critics complain that studio pictures don’t take risks any more, Maestro is exactly the sort of film we wish they’d make instead. Not everything in it lands cleanly, but even its misses excite, and its direct hits are knockouts.
With returning cinematographer Matthew Libatique, Cooper has made the mind- and eye-boggling decision to shoot and stage Maestro’s two halves in completely different styles. Happily, both are gorgeous. The early portions of Bernstein’s adult life are captured in glittering black and white, and played in the style of an urbane comedy from classical Hollywood, with Cooper suavely tripping around the place like Herbert Marshall. Then, as the plot leaps forward to the late 1960s, the vibe switches to the heightened naturalism of Robert Altman: rich autumnal colours, overlapping dialogue and shot compositions of almost cubist complexity.
Cooper opens with a quote from Bernstein about the meaning of art lying in its contractions, which was clearly a guiding principle here. Perhaps a little like Oppenheimer, or last year’s Marilyn Monroe film Blonde, Maestro is less of a conventional biopic than an epic Humpty Dumptification of its subject: smash, crash, look, here are the bits, now do your best.