"Maestro"
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Link to video
And, of course, Mahler...
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Jewface
Kind of like Blackface I guess
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Jewface
Kind of like Blackface I guess
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No worse than having an effin Mick play William Wallace. Fuck you, Mel Gibson!
The Brad
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No worse than having an effin Mick play William Wallace. Fuck you, Mel Gibson!
@LuFins-Dad said in "Maestro":
No worse than having an effin Mick play William Wallace. Fuck you, Mel Gibson!
Just imagine the outrage if Mel Gibson had played Bernstein
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must see
as a kid my mom took me to lincoln center often to hear him conduct the ny philharmonic
also heard him conduct in jerusalem the israel philharmonic.
quite a character -
Speaking of Bernstein biopics.
Jake Gyllenhaal will play legendary conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein in The American from director Cary Fukunaga.
The feature, which is set to begin production in the fall, is based on Humphrey Burton’s biography, and will follow Bernstein’s meteoric rise after conducting the New York Philharmonic at 25, all the while struggling with the fame of a career that included penning the score for On the Waterfront and the ground-breaking musical West Side Story. Michael Mitnick wrote the screenplay.
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The WSJ review: https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/film/maestro-review-bradley-cooper-leonard-bernstein-biopic-carey-mulligan-netflix-e82b1c0c?mod=e2tw
Bradley Cooper Conducts a Biopic
The actor stars in and directs a Netflix film about Leonard Bernstein that makes high drama out of the legendary musician’s complicated personal life but fails to illuminate his artistry.
In part that’s a matter of necessity: As with any creative genius, the ingredient that is most important (thinking) can’t be rendered on screen. Nobody wants to see a movie about a man sitting at a desk writing. Moreover, as depicted by writer-director-producer-star Bradley Cooper in an engaging re-creation, Bernstein had a trait that the film makes into highly cinematic drama: He was promiscuously bisexual. As the story begins, the young Lenny is leaping out of a bed he shares with another man, racing out of the room and into Carnegie Hall. It is Nov. 14, 1943. Without rehearsing, and with only a few hours’ notice, Bernstein has been selected to fill in for Bruno Walter as conductor of the New York Philharmonic. Such was Bernstein’s triumph on that day that he would be famous for the rest of his life.
“Maestro,” roughly half of which is shot in gorgeous, Expressionistic black-and-white (courtesy of the cinematographer Matthew Libatique), in its early scenes captures the ecstasy of being a young genius on the rise in midcentury New York, setting Bernstein’s fast-talking, charm-bombing ebullience against his romantic (some might say overwrought) musical compositions to recapture the can-do spirit of postwar America. He meets and woos an aristocratic young actress, Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), who, like everyone else, finds the musician captivating. The monochrome photography accompanies a splashy stretch of Golden Age Hollywood fantasy in which, for instance, the couple magically breeze into a private performance of the ballet that would become “On the Town,” for which Bernstein composed the music, even joining the dance themselves. When an al fresco luncheon strikes the pair as boring, they simply run away. As for Bernstein’s affairs with men, Felicia shrugs at them. “I know exactly who you are,” she says. She suggests giving marriage a shot.
After the film switches to color about halfway through, the mood alters. As we advance deep into the ’60s and ’70s, the sleek suits and elegant dresses of midcentury disappear, to be replaced by lumpy turtlenecks, garish colors, and misadventures in hairstyling. It’s an ugly era, and though the Bernsteins are awash in wealth, living in massive Manhattan apartments and a sprawling Connecticut estate, the toxic element of their relationship can no longer be contained. One especially dismal moment encapsulates Bernstein’s dissipation: He snorts cocaine off a silver platter with great boredom, then without even getting out of his chair hands the platter up to some friends so they can partake. Someone’s nasal drip falls on him as he does so. After raising their three children, Felicia feels increasingly humiliated by his affairs with men. When rumors reach the kids, she directs him not to tell them the truth. There is a cancer within their marriage that eventually becomes literal.
If Ms. Mulligan has ever been less than brilliant, I’ve missed that performance, and she plays Felicia’s journey from exuberant flirtation to hollow alienation with heart-wrenching poise. She never seems to be showing off or overplaying the despondency, which makes it that much more effective. However, her growing disenchantment is contagious. As Bernstein wears out his welcome with her, “Maestro” does the same with the audience; aspects that are initially attractive (such as Mr. Cooper’s habit of ordering his actors to talk over one another) grow exhausting. Bernstein’s tobacco addiction is played up to such an unintentionally ludicrous degree that hardly 60 seconds of the film go by without him taking a puff (he even keeps a cigarette in his hand during a five-way hug late in the film; has this man never used an ashtray?). And though Mr. Cooper has evidently put a lot of work into capturing Bernstein’s vocal patterns, his mimicry eventually becomes overbearing. If an actor is working so hard that all the audience can focus on is the work, rather than the character, it’s self-defeating.
The major failing of “Maestro” is that it takes very little interest in Bernstein’s artistry. As the movie gets stuck in endless scenes of marital discontent, we get almost nothing on the art of conducting or composition. The creation of “West Side Story,” perhaps Bernstein’s most famous work, is skipped and we don’t really get to know any of his famous collaborators. Moreover, the dialogue (Mr. Cooper’s co-writer is Josh Singer, who won an Oscar for “Spotlight”) is aggressively banal. Not infrequently, the film features two people rushing through meaningless hunks of verbiage at the same time. In other words, it’s noise, and noise is the last word that should fix itself in your mind when watching a film about Leonard Bernstein.
