I LOVE Bradley Cooper. His blue eyes, when you stare into them, are mesmerizing. He has a hot body and speaks perfect French. What’s not to love?
Well, this.
I have a pet peeve against actors who suddenly decide they are auteurs, and try to write, direct, produce, and sing in their movies. There is a reason that those jobs are given to different people. For example, I also hated his version of A Star Is Born. He ruined it. The story (in the three versions prior) is about the woman who rises up and becomes a star, and her alcoholic husband who has a downward spiral. Cooper decided to beef up his part (the alcoholic loser) and give him backstory. Ugh. In the process, he completely lost the story.
Yes, sure. His duet with Lady Gaga at the Oscars was indelible. But he ruined the picture.
And now we have his next venture, Maestro. Leonard Bernstein, inarguably, was one of America’s greatest composers/conductors. But, as an audience member, if you’re walking into a biopic of someone, maybe someone you know little to nothing about, you want to walk out of there getting a general idea of what their life was like and why they are so renowned. He failed at that.
But let’s take these things separately:
Bradley Cooper, the actor. We go to Bradley Cooper movies to see his handsome, rugged body and handsome face, and those unbelievable blue eyes. Here, they are hidden behind a large prosthetic nose (which in my Hollywood screening got applause for the prosthetic team) and bizarre teeth. His acting was ok. His wife (Carey Mulligan) was wonderful. Sara Silverman was superb.
Bradley Cooper, the writer (along with Josh Singer). Here is where everything unravels. Once again (as in A Star Is Born), he lost the thread of the real story. Admittedly, Bernstein did A LOT in his life. It would be a lot to stuff into a movie. However, we have no real sense of what year anything is going on, and the action really goes from the 1930s to the 1980s. Also, the real major sin of this movie, is that Cooper is pitching it (in ads, on talk shows, on social media) as a love story between Bernstein and his wife. The truth isn’t that. The truth is that Bernstein was a gay (or possibly bisexual) man, who married (likely) in the 50s and had kids because that is what famous gay men did. He may have been devoted to his wife, but his passion was other gay men. Cooper, as a heterosexual, seems to really miss this point. He does kind of throw it in as an afterthought, but to me, it’s the driving storyline of this movie, buried in other nonsense. That is the storyline as Cooper paints it. But what I really care about seeing is not who Bernstein is sleeping with, but what he did as a composer/conductor. It seems to say that Bernstein disdained musical theatre, when his Wikipedia says that the greatest thing he did was West Side Story (a musical theatre piece from the 1960s). Yet, this movie never shows a staging of that production. In fact, they talk about it briefly, but its only occurrence is one of the major musical themes which shows up to highlight Bernstein choosing his male lover over his wife in one scene (which, in point of fact happened in the 1970s, not ’60s). And if, for some reason you didn’t KNOW it was West Side Story, you wouldn’t know about it at all. Pathetic.
Also, there is a whole side story involving one of Bernstein’s daughters. Who cares about any of Bernstein’s kids? It smacks of the whole “We had to get the daughter’s permission, so we had to add her into the story” crap. It adds nothing. And, in fact, detracts valuable time that could’ve been used explaining some stuff.
Bradley Cooper, the director. Ugh. This is the worst. Actors have this misconception that the most important part of a movie is the actors talking. So when an actor turns director, he/she tends to have mostly actors talking. In this movie, it’s mostly Cooper and Mulligan, talking and talking over each other. Literally, you often can’t hear the words one is saying because the other one is talking at the same time. So annoying. There are next to no interesting shots. No timelines noted. No indication of which production of what is being shown. There are a ton of theatre people thrown in (Comden/Green and Aaron Copland most notably), but there is no explanation of who anyone is. I guess he expects us to know all this going in. So the movie is mostly Cooper/Mulligan talking/fighting, or scenes of fun backstage parties with no explanation of who anyone is or what’s really going on.
There was an interesting transformation of the musical theatre piece, Fancy Free, into the movie On the Town (with Frank Sinatra). But it wasn’t really explained what it all was. And why show that, but not West Side Story?
Other than the fact that he’s gay/bisexual/whatever, what was important about Leonard Bernstein? What did he do that was notable? Why was he considered one of America’s greatest composers/conductors? If you want the answer to that question, this is not the movie for you. It’s just a pet project of an actor who really should just stay an actor, for gosh sakes. We love him as that. He’s really out of his depth with the other things, and it’s getting tiring to watch.
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