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).

Ron Rice | The Flower Thief / 1960

discovering the tactics of gay survival

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ron Rice (screenwriter and director) The Flower Thief / 1960

 

The Flower Thief (1960) declares its difference from the opening credits picturing a string of long ribbons, tacked to the side of a derelict wooden building, blowing in the wind, the camera panning down, up, left, and right to visit the credits on small pieces of cardboard or paper tacked up to the building’s wall. We are no clearly no longer in the realm of “normal” filmmaking. The images of the narrative of this work are captured almost on the sly, and its narrative, which fits into no single cinematic genre, appears to be something developed almost by spontaneous chance. 

      Shadows and more ballooning pieces of cloth follow, accompanied by a gentle jazz score, the shadows themselves finally revealing their source to be the film’s hero, Taylor Mead, who stops outside a steel fence to talk to school children locked behind it, evidently used to his passing as they gather to play in his game of finger pokes through interlocking grids of the fence. This reminds me a little of Jan Oxenberg’s short section “Child Molester” in her comic film of lesbian stereotypes in A Comedy in Six Unnatural Acts (1975), which also presents us with a societally rejected figure interacting—quite innocently but to outsider eyes suspiciously—with locked-away school children.

      But our San Francisco denizen seems to be a total innocent bordering on a mentally challenged street person who smilingly goes about his journey, at times walking down the middle of the street and at other times clinging closely to the walls of buildings as he makes his way down the sidewalks, almost gleefully stealing a single flower from a streetside vendor.

     And for much of the rest of the film he participates in a series of episodes that present him almost like a tourist to the Bay city. He begins his day, with the camera tagging along, by visiting an art show, watching young Chinese-American children on the street, stealing yet another flower which he awards to a baby in a stroller, and attending a poetry reading by San Francisco black poet Bob Kaufman—often described as the American Rimbaud—at a jazz bar, the poet reading from his texts in the audio background while we spot our hero later grooving to the jazz rhythms. The Beats, including the homosexual declarations of Allen Ginsberg, are clearly part of his world.

      We soon see Mead back on the street, breaking through a glass window in a large vacant powerhouse in which all the other windows already appear to have been broken. The voice-over seems to represent someone decrying the current prison system as he demands that all criminals receive psychiatric attention. This, in fact, becomes a kind of sub-theme throughout the work, as we see our hero and others, themselves perhaps psychologically “outsider” individuals, bedding down in quite derelict structures. If nothing else, there is a sense throughout this film of the differences of those who are an active part of the normative society and those, like our central figure and his cohorts, who exist on the outside with few if any constraints.

 

       As our flower thief wanders through the empty space, the beginning of “Afternoon of a Faun” is played, as if he were on the verge of new encounter, but the music soon darkens as he discovers a door lying on the floor which, when he opens it, reveals an underground crawl space from which a young man with a large teddy bear arises, running quickly off the moment he spots our friend, leaving the stuffed bear behind.

        Our friend picks up the abandoned bear, taking it up as his companion for much of the rest of the movie. Clearly the meandering “thief” is not the only abandoned structure’s denizen. The “thief” runs into the old bathroom whereupon he discovers a urinal lying on the floor, recalling quite obviously Duchamp’s famed artwork. Mead takes up a toilet brush and proceeds to scrub the teddy bear’s bottom and neck before he kisses it, pats its knap into place and waddles away with it, as if it were his beloved child, looking through the cracked windows upon a nearby painter at work and piles of lumber strewn wherever you look.

      It is certainly akin to the destroyed world that faced Willard Maas’ central figure in his film Image in the Snow, and we now come to perceive that if this character’s world is not precisely the A version of a gay “coming out” story, it is most certainly close to it, the place in which the character now finds himself being a world without access to women and children in which he lies outside of conventional reality. If director Ron Rice’s hero has survived the terrifying “revelation” of his sexuality, we still must ask at what cost. If he is not imprisoned, he lives in a kind of prison of his own making and is still perceived by the society (and the viewers of this film) as being in need of psychological help.

      And, as if to prove that point, Mead suddenly falls into the pique of anger, after rocking the bear to sleep suddenly tossing him away and breaking up a nearby crate upon which he was sitting. The tokens of family and home are clearly not enough to replace the realities they represent.

      Suddenly a mass of other men come running his way, Mead picking up his bear and running off as a large man (Eric Nord) chases him. He jumps into the basement entry which the man cannot apparently enter, the “thief” popping up a few feet away through the flooring to mock him.

     A heavily bearded elder peers into the dark confines of the building with a look of disapproval, while the camera focuses now on a seeming wall of imprisoned men, a poet now reading a poem about how “mankind must be set free.”

        Apparently what was perceived of as the windows of a prison are the structure’s upper wire-laced windows, and the men, obviously now also denizens of the abandoned powerhouse, move downstairs into the main floor, performing a theatrical-like piece that begins with what appears as Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man who is pulled out of his universal circle and carried by the six men, calling up the image of a pietà, before they set him and down and push him forward, seeming to scourge him as in Christ’s march to Gethsemane bearing the cross. Some of the men grab up the large metal cross-like figure and a run up a small incline to implant at the top, visually playing out the planting of the US flag at Iwo Jima while at the same time signifying the uprighting of the cross for the Crucifixion.

 

       Over a period of just a few cinematic moments, Rice calls up the Da Vinci work, the Pietà image central to Kenneth Anger’s Firecrackers (just prior to removing the man from his circle, the men are all holding sparkling firecrackers in their hands), the iconic act of American bravery on Iwo Jima (a few moments before this Mead himself is seen waving a small US flag), and finally Christ’s cross, while also hinting of scenes of the Red flag raising in Sergei Eisenstein’s October: Ten Days That Shook the World—a vision encouraged by the musical accompaniment of  Dimitri Shostakovich’s score for the Eisenstein film of 1928.

      The endeavors of all these displaced men and one woman who appear soon after, they attempts to survive in a world hostile to their existence, for the director is clearly a combination of heroic and spiritual acts. In honor of their achievement the men set fire to a broom held aloft as if they were celebrating the death of the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz. The Viruvian Man which they have crucified, after all, is the same representative of normality who mocked their outsider society a few frames earlier.

      In homoerotic relief the men strip themselves of their shirts slapping them against one another as in a pillow fight, mock wrestling, and swinging from some of the ropes hanging from the high ceilings in obvious masculine pleasure.

      Our shyer hero takes his reclaimed teddy on a wagon ride for a hilarious night on the town as he takes in an ice-skating show, rides a mechanical horse like a jockey, and dances alone in manner than might make even the loose-jointed Groucho Marx jealous. He ends the evening by also setting a broom afire. The imaginary witch haunting their imaginations has clearly been slain.

     While the men, meanwhile, engage in some heterosexual roughhousing with the new resident woman—who quickly chalks up her sexual conquests, at one moment even attempting, unsuccessfully, to snare Mead’s character—the flower thief feeds his black cat and introduces the pet to his newly acquired bear, without much success.

     Time passes, and our hero feels the “autumn leaves” accumulating (the accompanying song referencing them) and considers, quite comically, what he might want to get out and see in the real world that various billboards announce, “Ice Skate or look!,” “Dolls of the World,” “3 ½ Acres of Indoor Amazement,” “The Lord’s Last Supper,” and “Tooth Pick Carnival.” Our thief choses to return to nature, carrying two packages of what appear to be food for lunch as he madly begins to pick wildflowers, putting them as usual to his nose to smell their perfumes.

      Returning home with a spare tire he evidently discovered, he meets up with the woman whose suitors have apparently all abandoned her. She attempts to tease and domesticate the thief, as he attempts to allude her, a taped speech quoting from Alice in Wonderland of the fact that, in one way or another, that we are all mad. Perhaps it is through madness, as homosexuality was still defined, that he once more escapes her attempts to club him into sexual normality and domesticity.

       A kind of crisis evolves, signified by arriving fire trucks and police signaling which way and when people should move, the last of which our confused hero mocks by imitating their hand movements behind their backs. Yet he even spends a day with a beautiful woman obviously in an attempt to return to normality. The day ends, however, with the same large man chasing him as before, evidently demanding orthodoxy of some sort which the free-wheeling flower thief, evidenced by a wild ride down San Francisco’s hilly streets in his wagon while holding his teddy bear, is unable to provide.

      Finally, our hero is captured by two vigilante cowboys and taken into a paper hall of justice where he is sentenced to be shot. Tied up to a flag outside of the courthouse, he is shot—with the sound of a pop-gun and car backfiring—and falls dead. Yet soon after we see him running out the real hall of justice, having evidently escaped, in some respects the whole scene calling up the antics of silent films, particularly those of Buster Keaton.

      Exasperated, he visits the Giant Camera Shop, a store in the shape of a giant camera, attempting to rewind the fate Rice’s movie has so far doled him out. He falls exhaustedly to sleep in the hind curve of a large stone lion, the proverbial lamb having lain down with the beast.

      He has at last reached the ocean, stopping in a small slot-machine arcade at the ocean’s edge where he meets a handsome young man to the strains of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for a New Man. When the boy leaves the game parlor, our hero follows him and eventually the two meet up enjoying the evening at the beachside amusement park merry-go-round. In the morning they walk for a bit along the shore, a boat in the distance seeming to come toward them, as if the proverbial boat that has finally “come in.”

       We see only the “thief” alone after that, but we know something significant has finally occurred in his life. He has, if nothing else, had a date with a lovely young man. He too, he now realizes, is now a gay man who can find his way in the world with the love and help of others.

       Director Rice has done something rather remarkable in this work. Playing out the basic patterns of the “A” version gay “coming out” or “coming of age” film, Rice has seemingly created a kind of improvisatory picaresque that embraces the works of notable gay figures from Genet (who, if you recall, was a “book thief”) Ginsberg, Rimbaud, Da Vinci, Nijinsky, Eisenstein, Copland, and others, while referencing nearly all the films of his gay peers including Anger, Maas, Schmitz, Harrington, Markopoulos, and even the gay literary and cinematic touchstones such as Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, in order to demonstrate a way out of the bleak vision of gay survival in the early pre-Stonewall years. Here the gay individual’s struggle to survive as exemplified in the form of the brilliantly awkward and intellectually unpredictable actor Taylor Mead, is a comic adventurer who while encountering danger and painful setbacks creates a meaningful if eccentric life in which there no need to symbolically undergo a kind of spiritual death or suicide. After his magical night on the beach, we can only hope our comic fool hurries home to stumble back into our lives once again, deserving now every flower which we can put in his hand or strew through his hair. Rice has created a newborn hero out of a gay cinematic tradition that has suddenly become aware of himself.

      

Los Angeles, May 31, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2021).