Review: Bradley Cooper Whores For The Oscar With "Maestro"

A transparent attempt at Hollywood's highest honor sinks what could've been a compelling, thoughtful biopic.

January 20, 2024

We all want things. Some crave love, others sex, and some seek to eat your liver with fava beans and a nice chianti. As the saying goes, “The heart, penis, and stomach want what the heart, penis, and stomach want.”

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In Bradley Cooper’s case, he wants an Oscar… badly, so much so that he created a biopic about the man responsible for cursing the world with West Side Story. He played the man, cast a Hollywood darling as his wife, directed, and co-wrote. He even wore a nose prosthetic, which every historian knows is a guaranteed Oscar.

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If this isn’t Oscar bait, what is?

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Of course, Oscar bait isn't necessarily bad; it's all in the execution. Besides, you can't dispute results. Many films have employed all the cheap tricks: long runtimes, sweeping romances, epic locales, vaunted historical figures, schmaltzy music, etc., to Oscar gold, and their continued success at Hollywood’s premier awards gala has frustrated "movie lovers" for decades.

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Still, it’s rarely about what you’re doing so much as how. We can all set aside inherent biases to celebrate good work regardless of its ill-conceived aims; the question is whether those aims seeped too deeply into the work to let it be effective.

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So, did they?

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Yes. Yes they did.

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Biopics must walk a tricky line; too honorific and they're treacly and dishonest, but too forward and they risk the necessary nuance to balance multiple realities of a complicated figure.

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Maestro falls into the former category, which renders it unwatchable in its first half, as the black and white is as much a visual style as a thematic approach. Bernstein is permanently at a distance, Cooper insisting that we perceive him as a venerable man despite his numerous dalliances with the reprehensible. He abandons his lover for his future wife, Felicia, cheats on her (occasionally in circumstances in which discovery is inevitable, like just outside of a party they’re hosting), and refuses to take any responsibility when years of Felicia's frustration and pain get unleashed. No objective measure of human decency gets met by Bernstein, which leaves us only with the childish perspective of any person who’s ever elected to prioritize art over ethics:

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“This person did something I like, so they’re above reproach.”

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It doesn’t help that Cooper’s portrayal is a cheap imitation rather than a detailed exploration. It’s not the controversial prosthetic but the emphasis on vocal inflections and mannerisms instead of evoking something from within. Every movement, every syllable feels calculated. It conjures recollections of All About Eve when Birdie warns Margo about Eve, her new assistant, claiming that she’s studying her like a blueprint.

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But unlike a movie, in which an audience suspends disbelief that such machinations could go undetected, when the actor, and thus the character, are the machination, we cannot ignore it, even more so when it’s so easy to find evidence of this cinematic crime online. The man we’re (theoretically) meant to understand is incomprehensible beyond being horny and musical. Considering his life and legacy are predominantly the latter, and it’s what the movie exploits to ignore his iniquity, we know virtually nothing of it.

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If ever there was a “tell don’t show movie,” Maestro is it. One could take a shot each time it’s directly stated that Berstein loves music and die before the end. If the game were to do so each time it was displayed in a way that inspired a deeper understanding of his relationship with music and why it means so much to him, you’d finish the film without even a buzz.

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The one moment where it tackles this without spelling it out is its reenactment of Bernstein’s conducting of the London Symphony at Ely Cathedral in 1973, where we see Bernstein losing himself in all-consuming joy, offering a visual connection to all the forced declarations of his passion. Sadly, not even that provides the necessary relief from Maestro’s ineptitude; Cooper’s imitation Bernstein extract poisons the moment.

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Still, Maestro is not a total failure. Despite its failure to properly examine the marriage between Bernstein and his long-suffering wife, Felicia, it contains many hints of Cooper’s ability to direct a substantial drama. Its conversations, though pretentiously staged and laced with melodrama, are forward enough to give some insight into the struggle Felicia faces being married to such an unabashed self-promoter, incessantly philandering, always behaving absent a shred of regard for anyone’s feelings but his own.

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Although we scoff at her eventual conclusion - that Bernstein’s forthrightness about his predilections and ceaseless need to satiate them makes her at fault for holding him to a particular standard, and all should be forgiven because he's talented - we watch her slow decline and eventual death with forlorn. Despite its many flaws, Maestro makes us feel something for this woman and convinces us that in his own warped, twisted way, Bernstein actually cared for her, and that loss does leave a hole, albeit one he fills with whatever young buck crosses his eye.

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Is it possible to pinpoint what allowed this brief pang of emotion from a movie that, while shot expertly, leaves much to be desired as a biopic? Arguably not. Within that shows Cooper’s ability to master the unquantifiable and drill into us the necessary components to create a compelling drama. We can credit Carey Mulligan for this, who takes a role of little fanfare (almost too literally, the film’s most artsy shot is of her dwarfed by the shadow of Bernstein’s epic stature) and turns into something engaging, almost hypnotic during her most demanding scenes. Her empty acceptance of her condition as she tries to extract final moments of joy from commonplace conversations feels more sincere to those with terminal illness than the histrionics of most movies, and one, considering her track record, must ponder whether this is down to Mulligan’s genius or Cooper’s direction.

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Regardless, while her performance is exceptional, we see, in Cooper’s handling of the camera, that he knows how to frame a stellar performance, allowing each note to hit with whatever degree of depth or delicacy his actors require, no doubt a skill acquired from being one himself.

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Unfortunately, to put it all together, he must first evolve beyond self-indulgence and care more for the story he’s telling than what awards that story could deliver. The unabashed reverence for Bernstein feels as much as Hollywood A-lister's preemptive excuse for any potential iniquity that could get dragged to light, employing that age-old fallacy that great art excuses poor character, as it does a cheap aim at catering to the Academy’s self-indulgence, dishonestly celebrating a beloved artist to hit at that age-old truth: Hollywood loves nothing more than awarding things about Hollywood, no matter how direct or indirect the relation.

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It won’t work. Maestro isn’t good enough to warrant such acclaim, Bernstein isn’t a vaunted enough figure to overcome the film’s shortcomings, Cooper’s desperation is too plain to make rewarding him feel worth the effort, and better movies and directors put out more worthy products this past year.

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But if nothing else, we see the beginnings of a potentially great director, and for all of Maestro’s shortcomings, as plentiful as those of the man whose tale it "tells," we can at least walk away with that.