MAESTRO

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/