*Maestro* Presents Unconventional Genius In the Usual Conventional Way

The Oscars love this shit. But they shouldn’t.

Bradley Cooper’s reverent Leonard Bernstein biopic, Maestro, does the thing that reverent biopics almost always do; it celebrates spontaneity and originality while hitting all the tired Oscar-bait tropes one after the other with numbing sincerity and grim literalness. Cooper, the lead as well as the director, dons a giant nose to signal that he’s Jewish and a nasal accent for reasons that are less clear—perhaps to cover up the limited range of his acting? To remind you he’s wearing the big nose?

In any case, the general arc is unaffected by either schnozz or dialect. Bernstein is a brilliant young composer and conductor, filled with vim and genius. He meets equally young, equally vivacious, equally unconventional actress Felicia Montealegre, and the two of them fall in unconventional, vivacious love—in black and white, to let you know that this is all happening in the past.

The only thing that troubles our hero and heroine’s progress from triumph to triumph is Bernstein’s priapic bisexuality. Felicia eventually gets sick of him canoodling with young male admirers in corners, and they separate. But they are drawn back together by her admiration for his genius and, finally, by her cancer diagnosis and subsequent decline, which provides the requisite tearful reconciliation, between husband and wife and audience and biopic subject.

To say the movie is manipulative is perhaps to cast aspersions upon competent manipulation; the emotional bell-pulling is so thoroughly default that you can barely hear it ring over the hammy, stagey acting. As is usual in these exercises, we don’t really learn much about why Bernstein’s conducting was powerful, or why his music was interesting beyond glib sound bites, often staged as actual interviews in the film with various interchangeable reporters.

What marks Bernstein as different or original, dramatically, isn’t his art, but his infidelity and his sexuality. The first is, again, quite standard; male geniuses in films almost invariably are shown philandering in order to demonstrate that they are flawed and interesting, and also to suggest that they cannot be bound by the usual rules of heterosexual monogamy.

Bisexuality is somewhat less common in the genre, but it is carefully relegated here to a secondary place. The primary relationship in Bernstein’s life is his heterosexual marriage, upon which his homosexual flirtations impinge as an exciting but also disreputable and immoral, hobby.

Felicia suggests in the film’s (inevitable) central knock-down argument scene that Bernstein struggles with internalized homophobia, but that’s not something the movie is ever able to successfully show us. In any case, her accusation ends up sounding like an excuse for the film and director’s own somewhat nervous discomfort with its gay themes, just as the brief mention of antisemitism comes across less as a thoughtful discussion of prejudice and more as a reminder that Bradley Cooper has, for some reason, decided to spend the entire film in a giant nose which turns him into some goy’s idea of a Jewish caricature.

There are several supposedly bravura scenes—Cooper racing out of his bedroom and ending up in the New York Philharmonic Concert hall without apparently crossing any intervening space, Cooper sweatily conducting—which are meant to signal to the Oscar committee that this is Art. And the Oscar committee, which generally thinks Art means, “telling the story of some inventive artist in the most staid manner possible” apparently agreed. Meanwhile, The Boy and The Heron, a fascinating, strange film by an actual, living, brilliant master of the form, was passed over so this dreck could squat smugly at the award table along with Oppenheimer. Which also used black-and-white and infidelity in the expected ways. It is what it is. But what it is fucking sucks.