Just last year at Venice, Cate Blanchett was introducing us to the tormented fictional conductor Lydia Tár, who watched old childhood VHS tapes of her mentor, the great conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein talking about the way music triggers in you emotions you didn’t understand and of which you didn’t know you were capable. Now Bradley Cooper, in spectacular hair and makeup, has directed and starred in this heartfelt, garrulous and faintly exhausting film, conceived with sincerity and taste, all about Bernstein and his troubled relationship with his wife, Costa Rican actress and activist Felicia Montealegre Cohn, played with rather brittle English poise and self-deprecating common sense by Carey Mulligan.
Poor Felicia has to come to terms with her megastar husband sucking all the oxygen out of the atmosphere and with the humiliation of his many indiscretions with young men and this is a compulsively fluent film, with Cooper and Mulligan grinning and scatting and chirruping their way through many extended and overlapping dialogue scenes. Cooper has already got into trouble for “Jewface” - though not for “Gayface” - in that he is a non-Jewish man playing a Jewish role with a big prosthetic nose. In fact, in the context of the complete movie, that big nose isn’t a big deal. (It may be karmic-filmic justice for Nicole Kidman’s far more ridiculous fake nose in The Hours, playing one of the great antisemites: Virginia Woolf.)
In the early part of the film, shot in luminous black-and-white, young Bernstein is a bundle of pure creative energy, but no soigné self-indulgent European. He is solidly American: muscular, frank, direct, almost like an athlete away from the track, and with a prodigious workrate that he never agonises about. His voice at this stage is light and rather high, as opposed to the gravelly gravitas of his middleaged self. And his attraction to men is just one of the things he’s relaxed about. When he meets Felicia at a party in the presence of his sister Shirley (played by Sarah Silverman, who has recently discussed her mixed feelings at actual Jewish actors largely getting to play supporting roles) there is a happy spark straight away. It is at this meeting that the movie goes into its screwball mode with Lenny and Felicia gabbling away to each other nineteen to the dozen, a mode which it never entirely leaves - or only in the final saddest scenes.
As the years go by, the crisp monochrome is succeeded by a rich colour which interestingly makes many shots look like Sunday newspaper colour-supplement spreads and somehow feels seedier and less innocent than the black and white. It is here that you see Bernstein bloated with all the Kool-Aid he’s been drinking, charming the pants off everyone, beaming with satisfaction at his own colossal prestige, dallying with beautiful young men and finally lying to his daughter (who’s sufficiently grownup to hear the truth) about the rumours she’s been hearing, smoothly attributing these to “jealousy”.
As for Cooper himself, he has an eerie likeness of the great man, particularly in showing Bernstein’s scary and rapacious upper set of teeth, grinningly revealed as Bernstein flings his head ecstatically back at the podium. Perhaps it’s inevitable that such an accomplished and studied impersonation should be a little narcissistic, but as ever with Cooper, the pure theatrical technique is very commanding – though there are moments when Lenny is bashing away at the piano keyboard, that Cooper looks a tiny bit like Michael Douglas playing Liberace.
In the end, Cooper’s Maestro succeeds because it is candid about the sacrifices which art demands of its practitioners, and the sacrifices these practitioners demand of their families and partners. Bernstein was never going to compromise who he was, no matter how much he loved his wife. There is a sad, wintry acceptance of that.
• Maestro screened at the Venice film festival; it is released on 24 November in UK and Irish cinemas, and on 20 December on Netflix.
