Review: Bradley Cooper's Vapid 'Maestro' Is an Empty, Craven Affront

By Jason Adams | Film | December 21, 2023 |

By Jason Adams | Film | December 21, 2023 |

Laying in each other’s arms after what we’re meant to assume was a passionate bout of lovemaking, the legendary composer Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) and his wife, the cool and classy Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), talk farts. Bernstein, feeling romantic, longs to be the air coming out of his beloved from either end. All of which leads to a brief contemplation on the tonality of breaking wind. And this will be the most insight that we’ll hear from Leonard Bernstein, the most important American figure in classical music in the 20th century (if not ever), on the subject of music here in Cooper’s cheek-squeak of a biopic Maestro. What an empty, craven affront this movie is. Pffft, indeed.

A puttied-up schnozz in search of a story, Maestro reduces the tremendous career and life-story of the world-famous conductor and composer of West Side Story to a grandly lensed but deeply cynical domestic marriage drama—one that gives the actors plenty of room to heave and ho and blow the house down, all in service of a bunch of half-baked emotional beats. Yo ho Oscar clips ahoy, though! There’s more weight in that nose prosthetic than there is in the script—structured as a series of propulsive moments meant to convey, I suppose, something about something, this is the sort of thing that will be praised as “elliptical” in the place of the proper word—vapid. It’s all hot air.

Cooper’s insights into what drove Bernstein wouldn’t fill a dance belt to completion—why did Lenny care about music? What did he think about music? Why was music his job, and not screaming at his wife in front of Snoopy balloons on Thanksgiving? You got me. Maestro is a movie about acting, not music—it’s a movie about Bradley Cooper acting, specifically. Or less a movie than an excuse. It empties its subject of so much specificity he becomes a husk of gestures. It doesn’t have a single thought in its head about the profession that obsessed its subject so much he became the most widely disseminated teacher on the subject — there is the sum total of one scene of Bernstein teaching in Maestro, and that’s turned into a joke about his narcissism. Lydia Tár should sue, I tells ya.

Instead, as is probably to be expected by a family-sanctioned biopic, we’re treated to an emphatic treatise about Bernstein’s great love affair with Felicia, which trumps any of that tedious “life’s work” nonsense. Phew, thank goodness—I mean, who’d go to a biopic of Leonard Bernstein to hear about all that boring music stuff anyway? And the great thrust of what makes their love so special, so much specialer than anything else we could possibly want to know about Bernstein, is that Bernstein was bisexual and Felicia knew and dealt with that until she didn’t. Which isn’t uninteresting! And it might have been a revelation if the film had any interest in perceptively threading that through Lenny’s work.

But Maestro decidedly does not. The gorgeous and rich mid-century classical music scene of New York City is simply the backdrop for a boy-meets-girl story, and yes boy oh boy does it make for a beautiful backdrop—Maestro is a terrifically easy movie to watch if you just let yourself coast by on all of its costumes and production design. No expense was spared, and every single craftsperson is very clearly working at the tip-top of their game. I imagine even the crafts-services table was breathtaking. There’s such a handsome and alluring sheen to this thing that it’s easy to get all swept up in that—just don’t go poking at it or else you’ll break through the paper and see straight into the empty soundstage of its soul.

For her part, Carey Mulligan is, as ever, lovely and reliably great. Whether the film is giving her the freedom and space to do so, or whether the script is so insubstantial that she’s forced to fill in the blanks, I will leave it to you to decide. Either way, she does a lot of heavy lifting making sense of Felicia, and she manages to create a compellingly confounded woman whose smarts were trampled over by her heart. She even manages to give the film’s manipulative and self-indulgent sickness arc, where Felicia gets cancer and Lenny stands by her side, some grace—as Cooper & Co shove the camera into her face for all the Maximum Feels, we wince right along with her.

And Cooper isn’t bad in the role—even under all of the distracting and pointless prosthetics work, he does channel an immense charisma and sweaty charm that feels true enough to the subject. He flails about correctly when called about to flail. Superficially he triumphs. But then that’s the summation this review keeps coming back to on everything here. It’s just that there’s no there there—great gowns, beautiful gowns, to quote another certain somebody who knew a little something about music. Maestro is like the night sky, sparkling and yet in between full of disquieting black holes—a vacuum that sucks the air out of both its ends. Just don’t call that music.

‘Maestro’ screened at the 2023 New York Film Festival. It’s scheduled for theatrical release in the United States on November 22nd, 2023, and will hit Netflix on December 20th.