Many of us have already watched Maestro – Bradley Cooper’s amazing
dramatic film on NETFLIX. As with so much these days, when life on
every front has become contentious, the film’s place on the good bad
scale has been rigorously debated. Some reviewers believed that
Cooper should have told the story differently – with more emphasis
on what the reviewer believed were more significant aspects of his
life – his musical trajectory, the infamous Bernstein Black Panther
cocktail party, made famous by Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities,
his career struggles and frustrations.
I’m not a film critic (or any other kind of critic either) but I admired
and liked Maestro, and have always found odd when critics
write about the film that should have been made, rather than the one
we are watching.
Leonard Bernstein, as we all know, was a brilliant phenomenon, and
Bradley Cooper plays him the way many of us understood him to be: all
energy, overflowing with ideas, music, and an insane and
believable love of people. Bi-sexual before bi-sexual was a familiar part
of mainstream culture. The kind of person who lives and loves for
music: music that is full, rich, and sometimes unpredictable.
Carey Mulligan was equally compelling as Bernstein’s wife Felicia
Montealegre, gorgeous Chilean actress. That they loved one another
was never disputed. How they loved one another, what they accepted
and what they didn’t, was some of what this film was about.
Leonard Bernstein and his magic and his achievements, and West Side
Story, is part of all our childhoods.
My grandmother, who lived in Los Angeles and was always interested
In celebrities said about Bernstein once that he was our Elvis.
One summer I was a counselor at a JCC Day Camp in Bridgeport,
Connecticut. Janie Bernstein was in my bunk. Leonard and Felicia
would come to the camp on mandatory parents days. Their arrival,
and their departure, was treated like royalty from another planet. (I
was part of a discussion about What Should We Give Them to Eat. No
one knew. I remember suggesting ice cream. I don’t remember what
we concluded, but it wasn’t ice cream.)
Maybe talent is about mysterious energy, and love. If that’s true,
Maestro is an interesting depiction that proves that speculation.
After we watched the film, I wanted to see Bernstein himself: to see
If he was the way I’d remembered from all those concerts years ago.
Here’s an interview with him when he won a Kennedy Center award.
Wonderful in an original way, he was funny and brilliant and full of love.
https://www.kennedy-center.org/video/digital-stage/honors/legends/leonard-bernstein/
I’m with your grandmother
So agree with you, Esther. And fantastic camp memory! Jeany