Bradley Cooper | Maestro / 2023

a certain type

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bradley Cooper and Josh Singer (screenplay), Bradley Cooper (director) Maestro / 2023

 

If we are to believe Bradley Cooper’s film Maestro, life for Leonard Bernstein (brilliantly played by Cooper) began on November 14, 1943, when early in the morning as he lay in bed with his then-lover, clarinetist David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer)—for whom he wrote “Sonata for a Clarinet”—the phone rang. Answering it, he was told that the guest conductor for that night’s performance, Bruno Walter, had come down with the flu, and since Bernstein served as the role of assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic for Artur Rodziński, it would be necessary that he replace Walter—without any possible time for rehearsal, despite the fact that the program included works by composers as diverse as Robert Schumann, Miklós Rózsa, Richard Wagner, and Richard Strauss.

     In the movie, Bernstein receives this startling information with a moment of calm before, in an absolute explosion of excitement, he rolls over his male lover, straddles him and reports the earth-shattering news, the beginning of a near endless series of visions of the man literally leaping, striding, and racing across the screen for a least half of the rest of movie.

     The film shows the ecstatic reaction by the Carnegie Hall audience who has suddenly discovered a wonderfully energetic new figure among their midst. What the movie doesn’t report is that The New York Times carried the story on its front page and remarked in an editorial, “It's a good American success story. The warm, friendly triumph of it filled Carnegie Hall and spread far over the air waves.”

    Between that moment and the first third of this film, there are perhaps only a couple of moments of pause, one moment at a brunch when Bernstein’s former mentor Serge Koussevitzky (Yasen Peyankov), director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the man who involved the young conductor for the rest of his lifetime at Tanglewood, suggests that to be perhaps the first great American conductor, Bernstein should change his name to Burns and stop composing his own works, devoting himself as a Jewish intellect, just as Koussevitzky had, to conducting.

     Fortunately, the young Bernstein totally ignores his advice and, buoyed up by his sudden acclaim, attends a party where his dear friends Adolph Green (Nick Blaemire) and Betty Comden (Mallory Portnoy) perform a piece from his On the Town musical, “Carried Away”; he is introduced by his sister, Shirley (Sarah Silverman) to his  soon-to-be wife, Chilean actor and model Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan); with Felicia he runs across town to see an earlier rehearsal of Jerome Robbins’ (Michael Urie) Fancy Free, for which Bernstein composed the music danced by four beautiful sailors (Benjamin Freemantle, Harrison Coll, Sebastian Villarini-Velez, Dario Natarelli) who perform an absolutely stunning homoerotic number into which Bernstein is pulled; he and Felicia rush off to the small off-Broadway stage where she is rehearsing, as a stand-in, her play; and then they run off, finally, to have sex during which he mainly complains of his bad back, she helping to cure it my forcing him onto to the floor!

    If there are moments of quiet in between—deeply personally and painful encounters with Oppenheim who, like his former lover, has now married and has a young child, along with engaging instances of the births of Bernstein’s own children Jaime, Alexander, and Nina—we hardly have time to assimilate them in the rush of activity that is meant to express Bernstein’s daily life. His life, moreover, is carefully culled by Bradley and Singer to include mostly the lesser known moments of his “wonderful” experiments, while ignoring the most obviously successful events such as West Side Story, the film On the Town (which wiped away many of Bernstein’s best songs), Wonderful Town, the original production of Candide, his contributions to Peter Pan, his film score for On the Waterfront, along with his popular 53 TV performances between 1958 and 1972 of the Young People’s Concerts—all the creations and activities for which his countrymen most loved him.

      Cut also from the film, quite understandably, is the highly controversial fundraiser organized by Felicia at the Bernstein’s’ apartment to support the families of Panther 21, members of the Black Panther Party who had been jailed, without the resources to cover the legal fees for their families economic survival, which was attended, uninvited, by then journalist Tom Wolfe of New York Magazine, who mocked the event in a cover story, describing it as “Radical Chic,” which made much of middle-class America hate him, his wife, and the effete, out of touch world, which he represented.*

     But in Bradley and Simon’s bio-pic chatter there are still enough incidents to astonish us. Edward R. Murrow stops in by way of early television to interview the couple in their Dakota apartment living room, with the young Jamie on the side with wide-eyes taking in the august event. If we don’t get early Broadway versions of one of its most lavish and expensive musicals, we do hear a magnificent choral version of the last, memorable song of Candide; and we are witnesses to a scene from the Kennedy Center production of Mass in 1971 (which my husband Howard and I experienced in person), all of which certainly live up to Netflix’s Facebook and Instagram claims of this film’s astounding sound editing by Tom Ozanich, Dean Zupancic, and Richard King, and in one of the final magisterial performances of the 1973 concert of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony at Ely Cathedral, employing the talents of sound mixer Steve Morrow. True musical lovers will most certainly want to stay for the credits, featuring Bernstein’s Overture to Candide of 1956 in a full audio version in which I’ve never before imagined possible.

    For all of what I have expressed above, along with the genius of the acting, sets, costumes, and musical splendor, Maestro might be seen as a contemporary masterwork.

     The film, however, is not at all narratively concerned with presenting itself as a biopic. And the real core subject of this film might be summarized in one or two sentences, that despite the chaos and mess of his life, despite his basically homosexual desires, Leonard Bernstein did deeply love his wife Felicia Montealegre and the family life they had together created. The film’s focus is not on the vast scope of musical and larger psychological events, but upon what never was spoken publicly: that beyond the surface of their flawlessly beautiful home life, despite even their love, was a series of disasters, of departures, and sudden re-encounters of the beloved “hero,” who even upon his returns still openly displayed his affections for passing figures such as Tommy Cothran (Gideon Glick) and numerous other young men who entered Leonard and Felicia’s living room and wherever else Lenny encountered boys.

 

     Like Linda Lee Thomas, Cole Porter’s wife, Felicia knew, as she repeats several times in the film, who Leonard was; but like so many such wives of the day and perhaps even now, alas, she saw him as a child in need of her devoted attention, care, and love, a typical female response of the day to homosexual men.

      She was not mistaken. Bernstein was so very desperate for constant human communication and devotion that he could not even sit on the toilet without keeping the door fully open. Bernstein himself summarized his darker aspects, represented in his late assistant Charlie Harmon’s biography On the Road & Off the Record with Leonard Bernstein: My Years with the Exasperating Genius—not referred to in this film—as “Mississippi Mud,” not at all the well-dressed “Lenny” swept up in his friends' John and Jacqueline Kennedy’s whirlwind life, but as a rude, petulant dismissive, haughty, unwashed, and, occasionally, downright sleazy human being.

     For a gay man in the late 1940s when he first met Felicia, she offered the beauty, poise, sophistication, and acceptance that a man like Bernstein, desiring to fully present himself as one the acceptable, gentrified Harvard elite to the world of conductors, musicians, and respectable composers (which we must imagine his dear friends Aaron Copland--whose long relationship with Bernstein is entirely ignored in this film--Marc Blitzstein, and even Samuel Barber never quite attainted) seemed irresistible. I am not suggesting that Bernstein did not love Felicia Montealegre; indeed, the film and other biographies of his life, including his own daughter Jaimie’s Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up, make it clear that he was devoted to both his wife and family—except when he wasn’t, which alas was all those days, months, and sometimes even years when he wasn’t fully in their company. 

    And that is the crux of the problem, although Cooper’s film does not present it so very clearly. It’s one thing to know that your husband is gay; one can even be noble, as Felicia perceives herself about offering such a husband a love you know can never be fully returned; but what do you do for your children, longing for a father who returns to them in fits and starts and never fully engages himself in their lives?

     Cooper’s film is on Felicia’s side, yet she is even more duplicitous about Lenny’s “other” self than he is, demanding when, as a young adult, Jaimie, having spent a few weeks at Tanglewood, has finally heard all the rumors about her father’s sexual affairs with his male students, returns knowing the facts but is still desperate to hear the truth from her mother’s or father’s mouth.

     Jaimie reports the incident in her book in a quite devastatingly honest manner. And she too relates, as does the movie, that her mother evidently insisted that Bernstein never tell her the truth. In the film we see the painful struggle of a would-be honest man having to lie to his daughter by arguing that the accusations are all about the jealousy of his success. In the film Jaimie pretends to believe it. But she herself, in her own book, having grown up around sophisticated figures such as Green and Comden, Mike Nichols, Betty Bacall, Lillian Hellman, Richard Avedon, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, Stephen Schwartz, Seiji Ozawa, Michael Tilson Thomas, and so many other gay and totally accepting individuals, knew the truth when she heard it.

      In 1976, Felicia gave her husband an ultimatum, played out in the film as her own placement of his shoes and personal articles outside their door and his own quite public admission that one finally comes to a time wherein one must allow one’s own creative forces to dominate one’s life. In order for him to return home, his wife declared that his must stop seeing his young lover Tommy. Bernstein picked Cothran and moved out, Felicia later declaring that if he continued in that manner he would “die a bitter and lonely old queen.”

     The separation was clearly painful to both of them, and was reported in the media, particularly in Newsweek. Even I, in those early days, knew what was going on between them.

      In the movie, Carey Mulligan gets one of the very best scenes of her life (which surely should be lauded by all critics) as she finally comes to terms with just how much she misses her husband, who himself has called her in an attempted reconciliation. Lunching with Bernstein’s sister Shirley—a woman who was so important to brother’s life that she might deserve her own biopic—Felicia tells of a meeting with a male friend who had invited her to a proper lunch. She was certain that he might be attracted to her, and he even appeared to be suggesting as much in his introductory comments, which, she describes, almost made her blush. That is, until he finally admits that his request is for her to introduce him to a mutual male friend Mindy, to whom he’s most attracted. Felicia/Mulligan’s reaction is perhaps at the very core of this movie:

     “I’m clearly attracted to a certain type.”

     Shirley interrupts, arguing “You know Leonard loves you, he really does. He’s just a man, a horribly aging man, who cannot just be wholly one thing, he’s….lost.”

     “I’ve always known who he is.” Her husband has called her and wants her to return to their home in Fairfield again in two weeks. “He sounded different….”

      “Felicia….”

     “No, let’s not make excuses. He didn’t fail me. It’s my own arrogance. To think I could survive on what he could give. It’s so ironic. I looked at everyone which such pity, even my own children with such pity for longing for his attention. It was a sort of banner I wore so proudly, I don’t need. I don’t need. And look at me now. Who’s the one who hasn’t been honest.”

 

    This profound speech by a woman of the time—there must be so many of them who had even knowingly married gay men who, given the world in which they lived, could not fully inhabit the heterosexual society which, in part, determined their success—is a recognition of her own failures, her own delusions, and her own even more closeted life that she has endured in their husband’s duplicitous shadow. One might almost describe this as a film about Felicia;s “coming out”—not her husband’s, whose sexuality is what in those days was described as an “open secret.”

     The film gets sucked down into a somewhat sentimental rabbit hole, however, since this incredible woman is soon diagnosed with cancer. And since Bernstein is not a true villain, much of the rest of the film follows him in his attempts to ease her suffering and provide the love he truly feels for his wife and his equally suffering children. There are painful but also absolutely loving moments to this portion of the film that might only be dismissed by the purest cynic—although one has also to admit that these passages take us into not only the painful world of Felicia’s cancer but a seemingly interminable passage of cinematic time. It’s beautiful, sentimental, and far too long.

     Yet the film ends with a series of remarkably honest scenes, the elder Bernstein back at his beloved Tanglewood where he attempts to teach a young black student the art of conducting, passage by passage, asking where he might take the next moment not through the musical rendering but through the gestures of the conductor’s magic wand.

     The student tries again and again to move the musical passage forward with the conductor’s baton, only finally to be replaced by Bernstein himself who clearly demonstrates how the next move not only transforms the music but the orchestra players and the audience watching the act as well. It is a mini-revelation in how conducting is not just the art that keeps an orchestra together in rhythm and flow, but demonstrates to the orchestra’s audiences what the music is all about.

      A few frames later, in a Tanglewood bar, we see the conductor dancing sexily with the same young man, clearly another of his hundreds of conquests about whom his daughter Jaime long ago heard.

    In this sense, Cooper’s movie doesn’t try to dismiss or resolve the sexual predisposition of Bernstein, despite the film’s desire to focus on his intense heterosexual relationship with his wife. We realize, Felica was an exception, even if possibly the major force, still not the “rule” of Bernstein’s love and life.

 

*Jaime believes that after that fiasco, presenting her mother as a political fool, Felicia fell into a depression from which she never quite recovered, and, so her daughter believes, might have contributed to his later illness.

 

Los Angeles, December 13, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (December 2023).