The other evening, I caught Bradley Cooper’s highly lauded bio pic Maestro at home on Netflix. Conditions for viewing were not exactly a hushed and darkened theater. Three and a half year old granddaughter Matilda spent most of the evening cavorting, singing, dancing, hoping, and sometimes just racing around the house. She drowned out a lot of the dialogue. But I saw enough to recognize a superior, maybe great, film that moved me.
Producer and director Cooper seemed to inhabit Leonard Bernstein so completely that moments into the movie you believe you are watching the real conductor and composer. Forget the passing brouhaha when the trailer was released over Cooper’s prosthetic nose. Beyond simple clever imitation, he embodied every gesture and nuance of expression, tone of voice, and the swings from exuberance to self-doubt.
But in many ways the real center and lead character was Cary Mulligan’s open faced and honest portrayal of Bernstein’s wife Felicia Montealegre, an actress with a Costa Rican mother and a Jewish American father. Cooper recognized it when he billed Mulligan over himself in advertising. She seems a clear favorite for an upcoming Oscar nomination. She fell totally in love with the brash, charming, charismatic, but self-absorbed genius but was always clear eyed about him including his known homosexual liaisons. She began with almost bemused acceptance, moved through toleration, resentment, and finally self-acknowledged woundedness. Despite the trials her love endured and was returned by her flawed and unfaithful husband.
Mulligan also had the greatest prolonged tragic death on screen since Margaret Sullavan in Three Comrades without the Alpine corn.
Bernstein conducting.
The other evening, I caught Bradley Cooper’s highly lauded bio pic Maestro at home on Netflix. Conditions for viewing were not exactly a hushed and darkened theater. Three and a half year old granddaughter Matilda spent most of the evening cavorting, singing, dancing, hoping, and sometimes just racing around the house. She drowned out a lot of the dialogue. But I saw enough to recognize a superior, maybe great, film that moved me.
Producer and director Cooper seemed to inhabit Leonard Bernstein so completely that moments into the movie you believe you are watching the real conductor and composer. Forget the passing brouhaha when the trailer was released over Cooper’s prosthetic nose. Beyond simple clever imitation, he embodied every gesture and nuance of expression, tone of voice, and the swings from exuberance to self-doubt.
But in many ways the real center and lead character was Cary Mulligan’s open faced and honest portrayal of Bernstein’s wife Felicia Montealegre, an actress with a Costa Rican mother and a Jewish American father. Cooper recognized it when he billed Mulligan over himself in advertising. She seems a clear favorite for an upcoming Oscar nomination. She fell totally in love with the brash, charming, charismatic, but self-absorbed genius but was always clear eyed about him including his known homosexual liaisons. She began with almost bemused acceptance, moved through toleration, resentment, and finally self-acknowledged woundedness. Despite the trials her love endured and was returned by her flawed and unfaithful husband.
Mulligan also had the greatest prolonged tragic death on screen since Margaret Sullavan in Three Comrades without the Alpine corn.
Anyway, the film got me to thinking about Bernstein, who was after all a major American cultural phenomenon of the second half of the Twentieth Century. Despite his own best efforts, I never became a fan of symphonic music, attended a concert, and only listen to it on other people’s radios. Same goes for most other classical music. But I did know his Broadway work On the Town and Westside Story. As a boy in far off Cheyenne I watched his Sunday afternoon appearances on CBS-TV’s Omnibus and his Young People’s Concerts. I have a clear memory of Bernstein introducing sixteen year old Janis Ian on his TV special Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution, as an example of the socially conscious and poetic singer/songwriters of the era like Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, and Joni Mitchel.
The movie reminded me that Bernstein made a popular LP with the New York Philharmonic and Mormon Tabernacle Choir in 1963. The Joy of Christmas recorded a Salt Lake City concert rather in the spirit of a Boston Pops performance than long hair classical. Today’s Winter Holidays Music Festival entry is a rendition of The Carol of the Bells by Ukrainian composer Mykola Leontovych.
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