He is only two films in, but Bradley Cooper seems to have already found his thematic sweet spot as a director. “A Star is Born,” the 49-year-old actor’s 2018 directorial debut, swept audiences away with its music-centric retelling of a classic Hollywood romance, making a movie star out of Lady Gaga and revealing Cooper as a multi-talented screenwriter, singer and filmmaker. The twelve-time Oscar nominee has once again set a love story against a musical backdrop, this time in “Maestro,” a biopic about the relationship between American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre.
This sophomore directing effort by Cooper trades in the powerhouse melodrama of its predecessor for a more critical look at the joys and sorrows of an exceptional couple over the course of their marriage. Such a change in storytelling style will likely keep it from becoming as instantly iconic as “A Star is Born,” but Cooper’s latest stands tall in its own right. Beautifully shot and movingly written and acted, “Maestro” is a poignant drama that asks its audience to remember the ultimate importance of being compassionate to one another.
The film opens on an elderly Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) being interviewed in his home. At this stage in his life, Bernstein is winding down a prolific career that made him one of the most popular musical figures in the United States and the first American conductor to receive international acclaim. During this particular interview, however, the classical music icon is not reflecting on his resume — he is reminiscing about his wife.
Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), an actress who rose to prominence on Broadway in the 1940s, was Bernstein’s closest friend and confidante through nearly three decades of marriage until her death from lung cancer at the age of 56. It is the story of that marriage that “Maestro” leaps back in time from its opening scene to tell, following Leonard and Felicia from their jubilant days of early love through trying times of familial discord and sickness. Crucial to its every moment is Leonard’s reality as a gay man married to a woman, a tension that tests his and Felicia’s bond and motivates much of the film’s drama.
Reuniting with cinematographer Matthew Libatique after their dazzling collaboration on “A Star is Born,” Cooper has crafted in “Maestro” the second major biopic of 2023 to brilliantly mix color and black-and-white photography. Unlike “Oppenheimer,” which repeatedly cuts between the two visual modes throughout its three-hour running time, Cooper’s film splits it roughly down the middle. The first half is presented in nostalgic black-and-white that evokes the innocence of Leonard and Felicia’s courtship, lending certain scenes of playful romance the faint quality of a fairy tale. That impression is deepened by the stylistic flourishes that Cooper and Libatique pull off in this section of the film. In one scene, a free-spirited Felicia whisks Leonard away from a stuffy luncheon to go watch an imaginative performance of one of his stage compositions, a scenic change captured through an overhead tracking shot and an invisible edit so that the pair improbably dash straight out of a garden and into a theater.
The fantasy of this image is fitting given the black-and-white section’s lighthearted tone, but once “Maestro” switches to color, Cooper and Libatique rightly take a more grounded approach to visually exploring the conflicts that arise during the film’s second half. Swooping camera movements are replaced by static shots, a standout being a long wide shot of a bitter argument between Leonard and Felicia that keeps the viewer as spatially distanced from the couple as they are emotionally from one another. The scene is representative of the film’s dominant visual identity, highlighting the careful composition and restrained cutting that give “Maestro” its appealingly deliberate cadence.
Within the film’s still, uninterrupted frames, Cooper and Mulligan are free to let their talents loose and bring their characters vividly to life. Leonard is played by an utterly committed Cooper, whose transformative, decades-spanning performance chronicles the man’s emotional journey as an artist and husband. He introduces Leonard as a young, lively musician eager to embrace the opportunities opening up before him in his career and love life. But as the years pass, and the affairs that Leonard pursues to realize his sexuality take a toll on his and Felicia’s marriage, Cooper mellows out to reflect his naturally charismatic character’s dimming spirit.
That is, until the six-minute take of the actor wildly conducting the London Symphony Orchestra’s rendition of Gustav Mahler’s “Resurrection” symphony. A show-stopping set piece that required six years of training to execute, the scene showcases Cooper’s extraordinary emulation of Leonard Bernstein’s musical virtuosity, making it the pinnacle of his performance and “Maestro” itself.
The most amazing aspect of this orchestral scene is that Cooper is not the one who delivers its most powerful moment — that credit is owed to Mulligan. As Felicia, she surprises Leonard at the concert after a fight had caused them to cease speaking and, embracing him during the applause, speaks a line of loving consolation that moves them both to tears. It is an act of humility and grace that distills who this woman is, and Mulligan excels at animating that characterization. The actress begins her portrayal by expressing the youthful Felicia’s endearment towards Leonard and her optimism for their future together. Affecting in this early passage of the story, Mulligan only becomes more impactful as the drama darkens, revealing a crescendoing performance that culminates in a heartrending depiction of her character’s fatal illness in the film’s final act.
Lying in bed with her adult daughter (Maya Hawke) wrapped in her arms, Felicia, nearing death, tells her child what life has taught her: “All anyone needs is to be sensitive to others. Kindness. Kindness. Kindness.” She and Leonard fell in love, hurt one another and drifted apart, then came back together when each needed the other most. From walking that path of shared pain and healing, Felicia learned that happiness and peace are founded upon compassion, a lesson that “Maestro” tenderly imparts to its audience in a cinematic biography that surely makes its subjects smile.
Jack Torpey '24 (he/him) is an Arts and Culture Editor. He writes film reviews for the Reel Critic column.
Jack is studying English with a minor in Film and Media Culture. Outside The Campus, he works as a peer writing tutor at the Writing Center and is a member of the Middlebury Consulting Group.
