Review: Whither Lenny? “Maestro” is well-made, but is it the movie we needed?
Review: Whither Lenny? “Maestro” is well-made, but is it the movie we needed?
“Maestro” is a Bradley Cooper movie for a Bradley Cooper world
Lenny and me
Full disclosure: I am a simp for Leonard Bernstein.
“Candide” was the first long-form piece of music I fell in love with (before any album). I played his music on a youth symphony tour in Eastern Europe. The “Maestro” soundtrack was chalk full of Bernstein pieces that pull at my heartstrings. I cried during the credits simply because they played the Overture to “Candide” in my local movie theater’s enveloping surround sound.
Given Bernstein’s legacy not just as a conductor and composer, but as an incredible communicator of ideas and advocate for music, it’s hard for a Jewish music journalist to not at the very least have a soft spot for the man and any well-made film about him.
Despite this, I will try to give a fair review.
Bernstein the _____
Approaching making a film like “Maestro” has one inherent problem. Bernstein’s life gives us a Ken Burns-amount of material to work with. Which Lenny is the movie supposed to be about?
There could be an entire movie on Bernstein as a Jew from his upbringing and family life to his many compositions on Jewish material to his long relationship with the Israel Philharmonic. Another could tackle the contradiction made famous by journalist Tom Wolfe in his essay “Radical Chic“: Bernstein trying to be both a member of white high-society and a communist sympathizer. A gay-focused Bernstein movie could exist and there’s no doubt a market for an entire movie dramatizing the composition of “West Side Story” along with the documentary that already exists.
“Maestro” in a certain sense accounts for all of this. In short, the movie highlights the toll Bernstein’s omnidimensional professional life and extramarital romantic life took on his marriage and family. Does it succeed in making an inspired dramatization? Probably only if you’re already a Bernstein fan.
The issue is that “Maestro” is a marriage story told in Zeitgeist-y snapshots. His conducting debut and Mahler 2 performance are well-mythologized moments that are highlighted despite having no real connection to his marriage. There are an incredibly brief few seconds emphasizing “zeitgeist-Lenny” where he arrives at the Tanglewood Music Center as they shoehorn in his car radio playing the Bernstein reference in the R.E.M. song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.”
If you don’t know who Leonard Bernstein is, the movie might strike you as one of those pretentious art films that only gives you meager scraps of exposition on purpose. If you know Lenny well, you probably excitedly recognized the context of different scenes. “Oh my god, it’s a rehearsal for ‘Candide!’ Oh my god, it’s Lenny’s famous conducting debut!”
How do you get to Carnegie Hollywood?
On the matter of Cooper’s conducting, I don’t think it’s worth critiquing. The mythos surrounding conducting prowess has so much more to do with the conductor as a spiritual leader. Keeping time is not a coveted skill that only an elite few conductors are capable of. In fact, most professional orchestras can keep time and play in tune without a conductor.
The special sauce for those “elite few” has much more to do with commanding an inspirational artistic experience with the ensemble, audience and public. A celebrated conductor like Bernstein is a shaman on the podium, clergyman in rehearsal and prophet in public.
I will also note that unlike “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “Maestro” correctly uses the term klezmer. Prior to Zev Feldman’s use of the term in the late ’70s, there was no popular notion of “klezmer music” in Jewish or general society. “Klezmer” referred to a person — a Jewish musician — and it wasn’t used outside of Ashkenazi Jewish circles.
Mrs. Maisel falsely portrays the general public in a comedy club knowing what “klezmer music” was around 1960. “Maestro” uses the following gorgeous line between two Jewish characters: “my father imagined me a klezmer, playing for kopecks on the street corner.” That’s some in-depth Jewish dramaturgy Cooper probably got from collaborating with Josh Singer on the screenplay. Cooper clearly took the movie’s craft seriously.
Bradley “goys it up”
Ultimately, I think “Maestro” is the Leonard Bernstein movie that Bradley Cooper wanted to make. I think it’s fair to say Jewish cultural critics have viewed the gentile Cooper with suspicion and the news media had its own little “Bradley Cooper Jew-face-gate” tizzy to the point that Bernstein’s children spoke up to validate Cooper’s portrayal.
The Jewish community has bigger fish to fry in fighting antisemitism than Bradley Cooper’s maybe questionable attempt at a hyper-realistic portrayal of a Jewish man. All of the people bemoaning Cooper’s lack of emphasis on Bernstein’s Jewish background should actually count their lucky stars that Cooper didn’t goy up the Bernstein qua Jew movie. The die is cast for a Jewish filmmaker to make the Jewish Bernstein biopic — nobody says there needs to just be one.
I actually think that Cooper’s obsessiveness in making this movie made an incredibly realistic portrayal despite his goyishness. He captured the enormous differences in Bernstein’s voice as a prim, Harvard-and-Curtis-alum young man versus him as a portly, life-long smoker old man. I fear that if a Jewish actor who was chosen just for a more naturally resemblance to Bernstein had been cast, the portrayal may have been more lazy — too comfortable.
A Bradley Cooper movie for a Bradley Cooper world
In making “Maestro,” Cooper stayed in his lane for better or worse. What do Bradley Cooper and Leonard Bernstein have in common? They’re all-American icons. What parts of Bernstein’s life are probably the most relatable to Cooper? Dealing with the adverse effects of suffocating artistic stardom on relationships and a personal life.
In an alternate universe where Bernstein is straight and a gentile, there’s not anything fundamentally changed about Cooper’s movie. Cooper’s focus is narrow and on subverting “zeitgeist-Lenny” with his personal life.
Especially with production blessings from Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, one does have to ask why Cooper took up a good chunk of the Bernstein-movie market share to take this angle rather than others. There’s an unavoidable critique of “Maestro” gay victim-blaming. While his gayness, like his Jewishness, is a visible aspect of the film, “Maestro” doesn’t unpack Bernstein’s gayness at all.
“Maestro” is the blockbuster biopic that Bradley Cooper and American culture wanted. It’s focused on problematizing the well-known “zeitgeist-Lenny.” Bernstein’s gay. Bernstein’s Jewish. I want more movies exactly because “Maestro” ultimately only problematizes Bernstein as a celebrated individual success story and member of an atomic family.
 | A guest post by
|