The Leonard Bernstein biopic dithers about his sexuality.
Film historians — if they are kind — will look back on Bradley Cooper’s passion-project Maestro and remember it only for “the Snoopy scene.” That’s where Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia Montealegre finally — explicitly — argue about his homosexual extramarital affairs. Felicia rants, “You will die a lonely old queen,” while through the windows of their Central Park West apartment, a giant Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon of the comic-strip dog Snoopy wafts by.
This scene should be laughable camp, but, instead, it is simply bizarre, because until then the movie, written and directed by and starring Cooper with solemn respect for its subject, has also been peculiarly cagey about Bernstein’s artistic and sexual drives. Maestro centers on Cooper’s assiduous show of respect for Bernstein — Cooper meticulously enacts Bernstein’s rise to celebrity while sympathetically balancing his hotshot, wunderkind arrogance with the physical ravages of time. (Stupid pundits hung up on Cooper’s prosthetic nose ignore the accuracy of Cooper’s other fleshly details.)
Cooper conceives his Bernstein tribute differently from how Terence Davies recalled Siegfried Sassoon in Benediction and how Luchino Visconti depicted Ludwig II’s sponsorship of Richard Wagner in Ludwig. The Snoopy scene owes to the hypocrisy of Hollywood virtue-signaling whereby Bernstein’s sex life is deemed more important than his artistic achievements. The giant balloon implies mockery while the rest of the film is oddly, frustratingly “discreet.”
The giveaway comes when Bernstein meets his wife, the Chilean immigrant Felicia (Carey Mulligan), a wannabe aristocrat striving for success as a Broadway and TV actress. She identifies with Bernstein’s own career aspirations but admonishes, “You’re a man!” This gender-identity caveat is the source of Cooper’s pandering. Bernstein’s randy dalliances with the likes of Jerome Robbins and Aaron Copland pause inexplicably for his choice of a marital partnership with half-Jewish Felicia, as if he’s seeking justification and social approval.
Maestro is trapped between contemporary identity politics and legacy admiration. Both Bernstein and Felicia react positively to the suggestion of taking on nonethnic monikers. They’re careerists, not trailblazers. Yet compromise and hypocrisy become the essence of their private lives. When their eldest daughter (Maya Hawke) struggles with rumors about the family’s open secret, the couple’s decision to hide their sexual truth from her seems unfathomable, anti-liberal.
This disingenuous biopic is symptomatic of our era’s convenient reliance on moral equivalency. That’s the only explanation I can think of for Cooper’s peculiar approach to his subject — half reverential, half reticent. It’s structured according to evasion; every scene and every transition dodges the obvious reality of the Bernsteins’ individuality. Cooper’s script, co-written with Josh Singer (Spotlight, The Post, First Man, all wretched), prevaricates shamelessly through quasi–Harold Pinter style in which Bernstein and associates avoid directly addressing anything. Even a journalist interviewing the great man offers non sequitur musings and then responds with similar vague distractions. The year’s worst screenwriting.
Cooper intersperses these mysterious exchanges with unidentified theatrical highlights — Fancy Free, West Side Story, Trouble in Tahiti, Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, the 1963 Kaddish, and the 1971 Mass — but the sociological landmarks are missing. No re-creation of the infamous 1970 “radical chic” party (made legendary by Tom Wolfe’s New York magazine report) where Bernstein and Felicia exerted white liberal guilt to celebrate and fund the Black Panther Party. It seems that Cooper and his ultra-liberal producers Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese insist on idolizing Bernstein as a complicated liberal icon while never really exploring his complexity.
So they emphasize mortality. The final scenes of Felicia’s death from cancer and Bernstein’s aged visage (actual video of him conducting at Tanglewood) end the movie horrendously. Mulligan and Cooper give dedicated impersonations, but the final effect is, well, mortifying. But that Snoopy scene is John Waters stuff without the laughs.