You thought I was done. I thought I was done. Then, Netflix decided to drop the trailer for Maestro, a film written by, directed by, and starring Bradley Cooper where he plays Leonard Bernstein. Cooper is an actor I find only intermittently charismatic and who did not have quite what it took to pull off the many hats of A Star Is Born (2018). Maestro appears to follow Bernstein’s decades-long relationship with and marriage to Costa Rican-American actress Felicia Montealegre. The poster, showing Felicia from the back, alone, is intriguing. The fact that Carey Mulligan has billing over Cooper also piques the interest. The trailer is a minute and a half split into black and white and colour footage, with soaring Mahler and charming midcentury mid-Atlantic accents. I’m linking it, though I do not like the look of it.
Maestro premieres in Venice in a few weeks; I won’t see it until its UK release. I cannot fairly write about the film based on a minute and a half of judiciously cut footage. But I’ll be damned if I don’t try - even if it means yet another follow-up post eating my words in a few weeks to months.
Yesterday I explained my belief that a biopic should not try to cover a whole life - let alone two. That said, these are some biographical bits I was surprised not to see in the trailer:
Any quote from the famous letter - the heterosexual energy of these two and a half minutes is surprising but not entirely unexpected. The biopic has the blessing of the Bernstein estate and family, and it makes sense that it would focus on the love between Lenny and Felicia even if there are other love stories in the mix
Both Lenny and Felica’s social activism, including the infamous ‘radical chic’ fundraiser for the Black Panthers
Lenny’s own music (including Symphony No. 3 “Kaddish”, which he wrote with Montealegre’s narration in mind)
What’s in the trailer, and probably should not be, is a fake nose. Looking at Cooper (without prosthetics) side-by-side with Bernstein around the same age, there is already a decent resemblance. Donning a prosthetic is at best unnecessary (see further on) and at worst playing into anti-Semitic representations. I do not believe an actor’s identity must align entirely with the role they’re playing, and there is a more nuanced conversation to be had around casting Jewish characters and Jewish roles than I have knowledge, experience, or space to give voice to (as a gentile, mine should not be the loudest voice in this room!). But considering the history of this trope, including in the writing of my otherwise beloved Thomas Mann, and the fact not two years ago a major UK theatre had to rewrite a play at the last minute for being ‘accidentally’ anti-Semitic, this… this is a bit much.
This leads into perhaps my biggest biopic bugbear: the belief that one cannot be convincing as the subject if one’s resemblance cannot be described as ‘uncanny’ in the tabloids. Enough with Gary Oldman’s Churchill and Truman prosthetics (though if he adds Stalin to the collection, that will be very, very funny). It’s in the performance - the mannerisms, the movement, the voice, the belief!!! It’s called acting, and it’s another reason why Elvis (2022, dir. Baz Luhrmann) is the One Good Biopic. Not only does it panache elevate the paint-by-numbers formula but Austin Butler really does not look anything like Elvis Presley. Looks, it turns out, do not matter. What does matter is an approximate hairdo, a committed drawl, a fantastic wiggle, and a dedication to swallowing the microphone. And that, my friends, is how you do a biopic.
I won’t be sending out two missives two days in a row anytime soon. In the meantime, I’ll be mourning the Jake Gyllenhaal biopic that will never be.