1/19/24
Newsletter #549
The Crack of Dawn
I attempted to watch Maestro last night. 28-minutes into the film – about the time that a decently written script is ready to throw down the gauntlet, setting you up for the next two-thirds of the film – Maestro decides to become an interpretive dance. Apparently, the English language failed to include words capable of expressing the deep ideas and concerns of the writers, Bradley Cooper and Josh Singer, so they decided that dance was the way to go. Three hunky sailors. Bradley even takes a turn.
It's at that point right there – somewhere between pages 25-40 of the script – which is known by us old guys; you know, the patriarchy – as the end of act one. However, if you haven’t even bothered to construct an act one – or even know what an act one is – that’s exactly the moment when your pants fall to the floor. It’s the terrible moment of realization in a nightmare that you’ve mistakenly worn your pajamas to school. To me, it’s like the pianist ran out of music, so they took off their shoe and began pounding on the keys as hard as they can.
Bradley Cooper is good casting for Leonard Bernstein, and the prosthetic nose works fine for the most part (out in the daylight is a bit of a problem). Bradley Cooper as an actor is terrific. Bradley Cooper as a director is fine. Screenwriters, Bradley Cooper and Josh Singer are clueless. It’s as though they were assigned to write screenplay about a person who amazingly and uniquely had no conflict in their life. Well, shit, now what do you do? Interpretive dance (or Jazz Odyssey), of course. I actually watched another 12-minutes as these poor fuck, know-nothing, wannabe screenwriters flailing and drowning. By minute 40 I felt like I was watching two dead screenwriters floating face down in a swimming pool.
I just so happened to watch the American Masters episode about Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein was the definition of conflict. This guy didn’t know if he was straight or gay; classical or Broadway; a composer or a conductor or a player; or if he was an agnostic, or a secular or a religious Jew. And since he lived his life like he was being chased by a ravenous, man-eating lion – smoking and drinking like a maniac – he completely ran out of steam, went into a massive depression, became an observant Jew, and was dead at the age of 70.
If you can’t find a story in that guy, man, you’re not looking.
So, why would you make a movie about Leonard Bernstein in the first place? If you’re asking me, my first response would be, “He wrote West Side Story.” If you asked someone else my age they could easily say, “He was the greatest conductor I’ve ever seen,” or “He played the piano on Rhapsody in Blue better than anyone” (he did). I can even see, “I love On the Town, it’s a great Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra film.” Had this film been made 25 years ago, in a standard style, with like say, Dustin Hoffman, it would have probably been about all of these things, equaling that Leonard Bernstein was a great, multi-talented man of his times, with a strange sexuality.
But of all the stories to tell, I don’t believe that anyone would have chosen, let’s not go into any of his pesky works of art, let’s concentrate on how cute his relationship was with his wife, the painfully miscast Carey Mulligan doing some sort of accent that she’s not pulling off.
In Bradley Cooper’s smoky, black and white, 1950s and ‘60s, there’s amazingly no conflict; it was a crazy, kooky romp where they oddly listened to a lot of classical music, and some people weren’t sure about their sexual identity. I haven’t seen the end, but I’m sure they grow old and die.
Meanwhile, there are at least five good, dramatic movies you could make about Leonard Bernstein, with great musical number. How about the nearly ten-year process of dreaming up, writing and producing the play, West Side Story, which would include young Stephen Sondheim (whom Bernstein helped a lot); the writer, Arthur Laurents (who had already written Hitchcock’s Rope), and the originator of the idea, and choreographer, Jerome Robbins. Bernstein and Robbins had a dramatic, fascinating relationship dating back to Fancy Free and On the Town. What did they go through to get the incredibly complicated, wonderfully sophisticated, West Side Story, the play, up on the boards?
Yet there are those who would contend that the true drama of Bernstein’s life came in his later years when he took over the conductorship of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, an old organization that had stopped playing Gustav Mahler’s music because of Nazi rules. Leonard Bernstein not only got the orchestra to play Mahler’s music again, but to do it enthusiastically.
And how did a 27-year-old American kid get to be the New York Philharmonic’s conductor, the eminent, Bruno Walter’s, assistant in the first place?
As I say, there are at least five good, dramatic, musical movies to make out of Leonard Bernstein life, but Maestro certainly isn’t one of them. Maestro is nothing but a vanity piece. It’s Bradley Cooper saying, “I could play him (with a fake nose),” as opposed to, “I could tell his story?”
In art your intentions mean everything.
Bravissimo! This is the definitive review of "Maestro," and its ilk.