For all the prerelease hype and speculation around Bradley Cooper’s Maestro—for all the tornadoing rumors and audacious public displays that marked the life of Leonard Bernstein, the legendary conductor and composer Cooper plays in the film—it’s odd that the most enrapturing moment is one of total silence. About halfway through Maestro, which follows Bernstein from the early 1940s through the late ’80s, he has an uncomfortable conversation, at the urging of his wife, Felicia (Carey Mulligan), with their daughter Jamie (Maya Hawke). A teenager, Jamie has finally caught the whispers that her father has been having affairs with men. He has; Felicia knows and allows them, but is frustrated at his sloppiness. So Bernstein takes a walk through Tanglewood to meet his daughter on a sun-drenched deck.
It’s reminiscent of excruciating exchanges nearly everyone has had at one point, as child, parent, or both. After some stilted small talk, Leonard broaches the subject directly, while Jamie can only downplay her concerns and curse her mother for relaying them. Her dad pushes on. “No, Jamie, it is a big deal,” he says, “because you’re upset. So let’s discuss it.” But this insistence on transparency is a misdirect. “Jealousy is the word that I would use,” he goes on. He tells a story from his youth, when he claims a boy brought a pistol to school, meaning to kill him because he was so envious of Leonard’s musical talent. The gossip about his sexuality, he explains, is the only slightly more respectable incarnation of the same plot against him.
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The lie works—too well. “So the rumors aren’t true?” Jamie asks. There’s a pause. Perhaps Bernstein is meaning for his words to land with more weight. In that moment, though, you can see him running each scenario through his head. Should he confess? Should he at least hint? But this is not the part of the scene that should win Bradley Cooper the Best Actor Oscar; that comes immediately after. He tells her that they’re simply fiction. “I’m relieved,” Jamie says. As she says this last line, the camera stays on Cooper, who plays Bernstein’s successful duping of his child as the tragedy it is. Not only has he denied who he is to one of the people he loves most in the world, but she has welcomed that denial as the greatest news she could have heard. Bernstein is no longer considering a confession: He’s crushed by what’s just happened, though trying and mostly succeeding to hold that anguish internal. The camera stays on Cooper for more than 20 seconds before he finally puts a cigarette in his mouth and says, “Let’s go inside.” Inside indeed.
Look: I get that this is all sort of distasteful. People have projected so much Oscar desperation onto Bradley Cooper that it can be difficult to view not only Maestro’s awards campaign but its very existence through any other lens. The line on him, since A Star Is Born was released in 2018, has been that the Academy is going to make Cooper wait years, decades to be rewarded—that handing him an Oscar now would be like rewarding the student who reminds the teacher to assign homework. But as with his debut, Maestro reaches beyond star-vehicle vanity for something stranger, smaller, and more upsetting. It’s the sort of ambitious, idiosyncratic movie that we say we want from our popular auteurs. And despite the deference Cooper shows to his collaborators (Mulligan is credited above him and promoted for Best Actress on the giant billboard I passed on the way to my office), it hinges entirely on his ability to animate the interior life of a man who nearly withered under public scrutiny.
A major-studio Bernstein biopic has seemed an inevitability for some time. Before Netflix agreed to finance The Irishman, Martin Scorsese had been prepared to make one at Paramount, from a script by Spotlight’s Josh Singer. (Singer is credited on the final screenplay alongside Cooper.) When Scorsese left, it was briefly passed to Steven Spielberg, who gave an eager Cooper his blessing to take the reins after screening A Star Is Born. Paramount, perhaps fearful of the film’s budget or Cooper’s unconventional approach to the biopic form, eventually kicked it over to Netflix.
None of which is to argue that Cooper should get extra credit, during Oscar voting, for shepherding the film through production, or taking over from all-time greats, or even for directing himself. But his ability to do all those things during a period of uncertainty in the business speaks to his clarity of vision about Bernstein. Despite the stuffy, misrepresentative trailers and despite the lazy dismissals by some critics, Maestro is richer, looser, and less concerned with rote historicization than other films of its kind. It’s comfortable breezing through the major beats of Bernstein’s life, if it shows them on screen at all; its rendering of his life, especially in the black-and-white first 45 minutes, is less than literal, the young conductor running barely clothed from his bedroom directly into a grand concert hall. And while the Mulligan billing is inexplicable, Felicia’s cancer diagnosis does organize Maestro’s final act. The film dares viewers, again and again, to divorce their reading of its subject from not only Wikipedia and West Side Story, but from our usual understanding of nonfiction narrative arcs.
And so: that clarity of vision. Cooper plays Bernstein not as a celebrity with a stark split between his private and public lives, but as a person unable to draw that boundary in his own head. His Bernstein is usually self-aware and occasionally self-flagellating, but is much better at being so when there’s an audience. (Maestro’s framing device is an elderly Bernstein, playing piano in his home, opening up about his great love and great heartbreak—for a camera crew.) When he is caught, in the act or merely in the thrall of his affairs by Mulligan, he always seems slightly ashamed—not of his sexuality, but of his inability to be who he feels he should be to everyone at once. He’s tortured by his self-perception as an inadequate composer; he’s enamored of New York high society and corroded by it, though brushes off both those emotions as petty and insubstantial. Even Jamie, in the moment when her father lies to her, is familiar enough with him as a constellation of half truths that she understands it’s up to her to construct her own version of Leonard Bernstein—to leave objective truth to someone else.
What is undeniable and unambiguous is the music. The end of last year’s industry strikes let loose a flood of press about Maestro and the other contending Oscar films, and with it dozens of aggregated quotes about the way Cooper prepared to perform the scene where Bernstein conducts Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony at Ely Cathedral in England. None of that promotional material matters: the six-and-a-half-minute scene, viewed in any context, is one of the most magnetic things committed to film in some time. Cooper’s Bernstein is haggard, angular, dripping with sweat, exploding with joy. He’s great-man stoic in one position, gaunt and desperate in another; his greatest performance is made possible by his total immersion in the work.
If the Best Actor race is not over, it’s at least down to two people, neither of whom is Cooper. At the moment, Oppenheimer feels unstoppable, and could well win seven, eight, or even more awards, including Best Actor for Cillian Murphy. It’s still possible that Paul Giamatti could play spoiler, but the way The Holdovers has flatlined in Best Picture (combined with the absence of Alexander Payne in Best Director and the way Da’Vine Joy Randolph has Best Supporting Actress sewn up) are making that less likely by the hour. In either event, it won’t be Cooper—himself left off the Best Director list, as he was for A Star Is Born. The award should go to the best performance; I’m not going to negative-campaign against Murphy like an SEC assistant coach. But beyond the merits, imagine what a Bradley Cooper unburdened by his Oscar hunt could do—imagine the stubbornness that brought this version of Maestro into the world turned toward genre movies, or something truly experimental.
Maestro’s final beat, before the closing of its frame, follows Bernstein after Felicia’s death, teaching college students how to conduct and carrying on affairs with some of them as he does. The film’s penultimate image is of him once again pouring sweat, but this time bathed in red light, the oldest guy at the club. Cooper the director colors the scene with the air of nagging embarrassment it deserves. But Cooper the actor makes clear that Bernstein, in that moment, is experiencing pure catharsis—the kind he believed he’d been chasing for decades. He was never going to be able to quiet all the noise around him, so here he was, indulging it.
Paul Thompson is the senior editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, New York magazine, and GQ.
