Maestro

“Maestro has a straight man playing a queer musician, a non-Hispanic woman playing a Latina, and the internet got mad about a NOSE?!”

Title: Maestro (2023)
Director: Bradley Cooper 👨🏼🇺🇸
Writers: Bradley Cooper 👨🏼🇺🇸 and Josh Singer 👨🏼🇺🇸

Reviewed by Alicja Johnson 👩🏼🇺🇸

Technical: 2.5/5

Awards season doesn’t start until a biopic about a white man scoops a few Academy nominations. We get two this year: Oppenheimer and Maestro, Bradley Cooper’s ode to the iconic musician Leonard Bernstein. Cooper directs himself as the Massachusetts-born composer, whom we first meet at 69 years old, reminiscing about his late wife, Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan).

From there we’re taken to 1943, as “Lenny” gets the call for his big debut conducting the prestigious New York Philharmonic. We don’t get to see that historic performance, sadly, as Cooper cuts away before the young conductor even gives his downbeat. This moment illustrates one of the biggest problems with Maestro. It so often excludes some of the most fascinating parts of Bernstein in favor of focusing on his tumultuous romance with Felicia. Many of his career highs, like composing for West Side Story, stay on the cutting room floor.

Although co-writers Josh Singer and Cooper have their sights set on exploring the relationships in Bernstein’s life, they don’t seem willing to touch the meatier questions. We’re mostly left to ponder how Lenny and Felicia feel about his affairs, his sexuality, and even what they want their relationship to be.

The film’s vagueness doesn’t fully ruin it—Mulligan and Cooper largely do a fine job as leads. Between their chemistry, rapidfire dialogue, and the stunning black-and-white cinematography accompanying their courtship, parts of Maestro feel like watching an old Katharine Hepburn rom-com in the best way.

But at the end of the day, Bernstein didn’t typically conduct an orchestra while also playing the piano. Maybe Cooper should learn from him, and either act or direct his films, for a better result.

Gender: 3.5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES, but barely

Although the film’s focus on Bernstein’s relationship with his wife hurts the film overall, it does allow us to spend far more time with a woman than most biopics do. Esther Zuckerman even notes that out of all the “Great Man” biopics released in 2023, Maestro “tries the hardest to put Bernstein’s spouse on equal footing.” But for all Cooper’s effort to make Felicia a full-fledged character, she’s still only defined by her husband.

Snippets of Felicia’s budding acting career appear in the first act of the film, but gradually her screen time becomes more and more about her feelings toward Bernstein. We see Felicia cope with the frustration of existing in her husband’s orbit, and the pain of his extramarital activities. But unfortunately, the script heavily relies on Mulligan’s performance to inject any nuance, as Felicia only speaks about her more complex feelings in riddles. So while it’s wonderful that Cooper provides so much space for her on screen, we never actually gain much insight into the character.

Beyond Felicia, women largely stay on the sidelines. Bernstein’s sister Shirley (Sarah Silverman) and his daughter Jamie (Maya Hawke) occasionally pop up, but their presence feels incidental. When credits roll, we still walk away thinking of these women primarily as “Bernstein’s wife,” “Bernstein’s sister,” and “Bernstein’s daughter.”

Race: 1/5

Not-so-fun fact: The classical music industry makes Hollywood look like a Benetton ad by comparison. Black and Latino artists in particular face difficult barriers to entry, together making up just 7.2% of professional musicians in American orchestras last year when they comprise almost a third of the population. Maestro appears to follow suit, choosing not to engage with people of color by simply excluding them.

To start, we have the horribly misguided casting of non-Hispanic actor Mulligan as the Costa Rican-born Felicia Montealegre. Yes, Felicia was white—but she was also a Latina. While this mistake can’t compare to putting brownface on the white actor who played Puerto Rican Maria in West Side Story (1961), we still see a prestigious Latina role instead go to a non-Hispanic white actor. And in Maestro’s case, this white actor might win an Oscar.

Beyond the initial casting misstep, we contend with an almost fully white movie, which doesn’t even reflect Bernstein’s life. Cooper could have shown us Bernstein’s conduction of Louis Armstrong, or his performance in support of marches for Black voting rights, or even Felicia’s dinner party to raise money for the Black Panther Party. But he chose not to, effectively whitewashing our maestro’s history.

Deduction for LGBTQ: -0.50

We should be using this moment to celebrate LGBTQ representation. Maestro, after all, depicts an iconic queer composer. Unfortunately, the film only cares about Bernstein’s sexuality to the extent that it creates drama and tension in his marriage to a woman.

Like many queer figures who rose to prominence in the 1940s, Bernstein chose to hide his sexual orientation from the public. To this day, scholars debate whether he would identify as gay or bisexual. Maestro gives us a quick glimpse into Bernstein’s choice to marry a woman via his mentor Serge Koussevitzky (Yasen Peyankov): “He can be the first great conductor,” Koussevitzky tells Felicia, “but he would have to conduct his life in such a way that when he comes out on stage to lead his orchestra, he can truthfully say to himself, ‘my life and my work are clean.’”

Bernstein appears to briefly consider this comment before we cut to his courtship and subsequent marriage of Felicia, suggesting that our maestro interprets “clean” to mean “heterosexual.” Here, instead of allowing Bernstein to describe his choice in his own words, Cooper asks the audience to draw on our internalized homophobia and make our own assumptions.

To Cooper’s credit, he does turn an empathetic eye to Bernstein’s dilemma, never casting judgment on his affairs during 27 years of marriage. But overall, Cooper condemned Maestro’s queer representation to fail the second he decided to center a conventional relationship. The choice sadly continues our culture’s time-honored tradition of telling stories about queer characters through the “straight gaze,” in Maestro’s case sidelining Bernstein’s sexuality to make him appeal to presumably straight viewers.

Perhaps the film would feel more authentic if it had been made in collaboration with more LGBTQ-identifying artists. On screen, gay actors Matt Bomer and Michael Urie get brief appearances as Bernstein’s lover and his West Side Story collaborator, respectively. But otherwise, a team of straight creatives wrote, produced, and directed Maestro. Even worse, we can all tell.

Bonus for Religion: +0.25

Oy vey. Maestro has a straight man playing a queer musician, a non-Hispanic woman playing a Latina, and the internet got mad about a NOSE?!

If you were fortunate enough to miss so-called “nosegate,” just know that the internet exploded upon seeing press pictures of Cooper as Bernstein sporting a prosthetic nose. Many claimed antisemitism, saying the nose conjured images of Nazi propaganda, which usually depicted Jews having oversized, hooked noses.

Some people went as far as decrying Cooper for donning “Jewface,” a term we should send for a long walk off a short pier. Made popular by Jewish comedian Silverman (who’s been ironically silent on her gentile Maestro co-stars as of this writing), “Jewface” implies that there’s a right way to look as a Jew. I’ve been told that I “don’t look Jewish” by too many people to count because of this ideology. But as Rebecca Pierce astutely noted when Silverman raised the issue in 2021, “Jewface” causes much deeper harm: “It expresses an ultimately white supremacist notion of who is Jewish that first flattens Jewry into Ashkenazic whiteness and then naturalizes that racial categorization by likening it to Blackness or ‘any other minority.’”

Now that we’ve all agreed to ditch that word, let’s get back to the question at hand: Is Cooper’s nose antisemitic? Of course not. Maestro doesn’t exist to denigrate Jews. If anything, it wants to celebrate a Jewish composer whom orchestras usually overlook in favor of performing Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Strauss, or any number of deeply antisemitic artists. And Cooper largely succeeds at this goal, perhaps due to his Jewish co-writer’s contributions to the script.

Nonetheless, if any Jewish viewers have non-schnozz-related disappointments in the film, it would be understandable. For one thing, Cooper omits Bernstein’s dedication to activism—a core part of Judaism for many of us. But we can’t spend too much time on that oversight when there’s casting fun to discuss!

As we’ve noted with Oppenheimer, casting actors to play characters outside of their faith doesn’t automatically doom a film’s portrayal of a minority religion. But we should still acknowledge that Catholic Bradley Cooper playing Bernstein continues the long held Hollywood practice of “write Yiddish, cast British”—a phrase coined in the 1940s that reflected many Jewish producers’ belief that audiences would reject a Jewish actor playing a character of the faith. From The Marvelous Ms. Maisel (2017–23) to Shiva Baby (2020) to The Fabelmans (2022), it seems like the industry still clutches to this strategy. So while Cooper as Bernstein doesn’t trash Maestro’s portrayal of Jews, seeing a Jewish actor in the role would have felt like progress.

Mediaversity Grade: D 2.25/5

Cooper’s fixation on catering Maestro for a straight audience and whitewashing the composer’s life doesn’t just harm its representation, it deprives us of an exciting, complex film more befitting of Bernstein’s legacy.

Like Maestro? Try these other titles about incredible conductors and composers.

Grade: DLiFebruary 29, 2024