Among other things, “On the Waterfront” (1954) is a glove story. Walking near the river, on a cold day, Eva Marie Saint drops a glove. Marlon Brando picks it up and puts it on. He unwraps a stick of gum. After a while, she tugs the glove from his hand. Contact is made. She goes and stands by an iron railing. He says, “You don’t remember me, do you?” Just before she replies, we hear music: woodwind solos, with the clarinet leading the way. “I remembered you the first moment I saw you,” she says. Strings join the woodwinds. Brando chews gum, walks off, turns, and beckons, calling out, “Come on.”
The music, unobtrusive yet edged with romantic encouragement, is by Leonard Bernstein. It’s the only score that he wrote directly for the movies. If only he had written more. (“On the Town” and “West Side Story” sprang from the theatre and, for many listeners, lost a jolt of energy when they arrived onscreen.) In truth, given his influence on so many realms of American culture—as a composer, a conductor, a lecturer, a TV presenter, an author, a New Yorker, and an activist—it’s astonishing how faint a mark Bernstein left on cinema. Maybe he feared, with good cause, that the compromises involved in filmmaking were even more grievous than those inflicted elsewhere. His most astute contribution may be “What a Movie!,” a mezzo-soprano number composed for his 1952 opera, “Trouble in Tahiti,” during which the heroine, Dinah, derides a film that she just saw (“What escapist Technicolor twaddle”), only to be swept up, despite herself, in the tropical fantasies that it purveyed.
Now we have “Maestro,” a new Bernstein bio-pic. It’s directed by Bradley Cooper, who wrote the screenplay with Josh Singer and, to treble the fun, takes the role of Bernstein. The movie covers miles of chronological ground. We start with the aged Bernstein, adenoidal, snowy-haired, and armed with the tools without which he can’t exist: a piano and a cigarette. (Warning: The tobacco consumption in this film will take your breath away. Bernstein even smokes in a doctor’s waiting room.) Then it’s a long hop back to his twenty-five-year-old self, plucked from his slumbers by a phone call, on November 14, 1943, informing him that, alas, Bruno Walter is indisposed and that Bernstein, with only a few hours’ notice and no rehearsal, must conduct the New York Philharmonic.
Suddenly, we’re in an action movie. Bernstein leaps up, opens the curtains, flings his arms wide, and utters a roar of anticipatory delight, like Tarzan greeting a bright new day in the jungle. You half expect him to beat his chest. The camera then tracks him as he races out of the room, down a corridor, and onto the balcony at Carnegie Hall, where the afternoon’s concert is to take place. With one bravura sleight of hand, in short, Cooper whisks his hero straight from bed to auditorium—the two arenas whose lure, according to this film, he could never resist.
Another flourish, at a sunlit lunch outdoors: Bernstein is seated next to an actress, Felicia Montealegre Cohn (Carey Mulligan), whom he adores and will later wed. At the head of the table is the Russian-born maestro Serge Koussevitzky (Yasen Peyankov), who advises Bernstein, as a fellow-Jew, to trim his name to the more acceptable Burns, and says he could become “the first great American conductor.” Bernstein promises to give up “that musical-theatre stuff.” Felicia, however, wants to hear it, so he grabs her hand and the two of them rudely rush away, arriving as if by magic at a stage, where “Fancy Free,” the 1944 Jerome Robbins ballet, with music by Bernstein—a work that swells into “On the Town”—is being performed. Somehow, the two intruders are caught up in it. If you ever dreamed of seeing Bradley Cooper in a sailor suit, with a dinky little matching hat, here’s your chance.
For all the reckless elation in that scene, there is a frisson of foreboding, too, as Felicia is no sooner pulled toward her paramour than she is yanked away. And there, in essence, you have “Maestro.” It’s a dance of the passions—a labor of love, on Cooper’s part, as well as a demonstration of the unfriendly fact that love can be hard labor. Felicia is well aware, when she marries Bernstein, that he is bisexual; what she fails to foresee is how panamorous he is. “I love too much, what can I say?” he declares, in proud and mirthful apology, and the movie surveys the blast area around his uncontainable person. He cannot stanch the joy of his desiring any more than he can curb the catholicity of his musical tastes, and, for good or ill, other souls feel the brunt. We see the older Bernstein, at Tanglewood, school a young student in Beethoven, and then caress him to the thumping chant of “Shout,” by Tears for Fears. And we wince as Bernstein reassures his elder daughter, Jamie, finely played by Maya Hawke, that rumors about his gay dalliances are stoked by nothing but jealousy. To be fair, he is acting on Felicia’s instructions: “Don’t you dare tell her the truth.”
Here are some things with which “Maestro” is not concerned. First, Bernstein’s childhood and adolescence. (Apart from one Oedipal confession: “I used to have dreams where I would kill my father.”) Second, his politics. No effort is made, thank heaven, to dramatize the party that Felicia gave in their Park Avenue apartment, in 1970, to raise funds for the defense of imprisoned Black Panther members, thus igniting Tom Wolfe’s incendiary charges of “radical chic.” Third, Bernstein’s Judaism, which led him to the helm of the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, later the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra; in Beersheba, in 1948, so many troops massed for his performance of Mozart, Beethoven, and Gershwin that Egyptian airplanes, overhead, reported a military maneuver. Fourth, his pedagogy, which seems in retrospect to be central, rather than tangential, to his achievement. No one has, with less strain, refined the art of talking neither up nor down but directly to an audience, under the pitiless gaze of television cameras, while unpicking a tangled topic. In last year’s “Tár,” when the disgraced heroine sought comfort in Bernstein, she didn’t listen to an LP or a CD. She chose one of his Young People’s Concerts, on an old videotape.
Strange to say, “Maestro” isn’t really about music. (Nor was “Tár.”) The whole thing may be drenched in music, but Cooper is inspired less by the creative source of the sound than by the emotional destination to which it flows—that is, Felicia. We join Bernstein’s marshalling of Mahler’s Second Symphony, for instance, in Ely Cathedral, in England. The scene is based on a filmed record of the event, from 1973, and Cooper closely imitates the paroxysmal gestures of Bernstein on the podium, but notice what happens after the crash of the final chord: the camera glides away and comes to rest on Felicia’s enraptured face, as she watches from the transept. Something similar occurs, in a lower and more wretched key, at the première of Bernstein’s “Mass,” where, rather than conducting, he sits in the balcony between his latest beau, Tommy Cothran (Gideon Glick), and Felicia. She glances down at the men’s hands entwining, in the half-dark, and sees love slipping from her grasp.
Felicia is the last character whom we see in “Maestro,” and the first actor’s name in the end credits is that of Carey Mulligan. This is her movie, and Cooper, to do him justice, knows it. How she can manifest such sweetness of nature without a trace of cloying, let alone mush, beats me. “You don’t even know how much you need me, do you?” Felicia says to Bernstein, as they lie and linger on the floor after making love. I spy a ghost of Julie Andrews in Mulligan’s smile, at once forgiving and brisk, and what she establishes, in Felicia, is the perfect ratio of rose to thorn. Hence the film’s best sequence, which is shot in one take, with no music and no camera movement at all. Mr. and Mrs. Bernstein talk, just the two of them, in a room overlooking Central Park West, during a Thanksgiving Day parade. The conversation stiffens into repartee, and then into rage. “If you’re not careful, you’re going to die a lonely old queen,” Felicia cries. Behind them, through the window, we glimpse the huge head of a Snoopy floating by. Amid the Pax Americana, here is war.
The movie does feature a death, though whose I will not reveal. Suffice to say that, in its wake, some viewers will have to be mopped up from the floor of the cinema. The looming pain is both sharpened and soothed not by Mozart or Mahler but by the sight of the Bernstein children larking around to Shirley Ellis’s “The Clapping Song.” This is where “Maestro” scores. Spurning a fruitless bid at comprehensiveness, Cooper has conjured something as restless and as headlong as his subject. (“I’m always just barely keeping up with myself,” Bernstein once said.) To and fro we go, from the incisive bite of black-and-white, for the dawning of Bernstein’s fame, to the rich ironic glow of color in his later, grander, and less contented years; from the furious bliss of ambition to a kind of exhausted peace. And, if Leonard Bernstein never got to star as Tchaikovsky in a Hollywood bio-pic, opposite Greta Garbo as the composer’s patron—a project that was seriously mooted in 1945—then let us not lament too long. The guy had other things to do. ♦
